Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
..I want to share with you the story of one man who woke up from the Al-Qaeda trance. This story is based on an interview conducted by Al-Arabiya TV. And this man’s name is “Mullah”, Nadhem Al-Jibbouri, from the God forsaken village “Al Dhulueiya” in the Salahedin province. Nadhem Al-Jibbouri, an imam or a mullah? around 30 years old, was Al-Qaeda spokesperson under Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. He was responsible for issuing Fatwas and responsible for the AQ’s “PR” and Information bureau in the Salahedin province. From a white turbaned man in a Dishdasha, (traditional robe), Nadhem Al-Jibbouri is today a man dressed in a suit with tons of gel on his hair, sitting in front of the Al-Arabiya camera. His new post, as the Awakening man in the Salahedin province earned him that new look…Nadhem gives a good insight into who and what Al-Qaeda is, in Iraq. Al-Qaeda leadership in Iraq, at least in the Salahedin province is made exclusively of “foreigners” for the most part “Arabs” coming from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia…

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From the Nile to the Euphrates; The ‘Victims of a Map’
Felicity Arbuthnot
When the State of Israel declared independence on 14th May 1948, her founding vow was to:”… uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of religion, race, or sex; (to) guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education, and culture; will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and will loyally uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter. . . .” Israel called: “upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions.” Israel is about to celebrates sixty years of human rights violations against the region, Palestinians and destruction of their ever diminishing lands, revelling, in effect on graves, ancient bulldozed groves and over half a century of decimation of dreams, homes, heritage. The travesty of the theocracy’s founding on the above untruth, its betrayal, from the State’s inception, is encapsulated in the story of one child, caught in the early displacement of nearly three quarter of a million souls from the land of their birth. A forced flight and fragmentation of families, friends, communities, unceasing over six grinding decades…

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STC: Incarceration conditions of Palestinian children in Israeli jails shocking
Palestinian Information Center
Britain-based Save the Children organization revealed facts described as “shocking” related to incarceration conditions of Palestinian children in Israeli occupation jails, pointing out that the most disturbing phenomenon observed by international organization was that Israel arrests children and issues sentences against them harsher than others. According to the organization, the IOF troops kidnapped 6,000 Palestinian children since the beginning of the Aqsa Intifada eight years ago, and there are currently more than 320 children detained in Israeli jails, adding that the IOA detains on average about 700 children every year….

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“God Angels” Feed Displaced Iraqis
Afif Sarhan, IOL Correspondent
Failed by the government and the world community, thousands of displaced families across Iraq have been relying on assistance from resistance and militia groups. “My family has been displaced since the fighting in Fallujah in 2004,” Hadija Mohammad Rafi, 42, told IslamOnline.net. “Aid is rare in our displacement camp and aid agencies are forgetting us,” she complained. “The government never did any thing for us and even the pledged compensation hasn’t reached to us yet,” added Rafi. “Some Sunni resistance groups in Anbar have been sending us food parcels and cooking gas to help us. They never asked for anything in return and promised our lives would be better once they free our country from US troops,” she noted. “Our local people call them the ‘angels of God’ as they are doing what no human being is doing in our land.”…Abu Ahmed, the Ramadi resident, has decided to join the Sunni resistance after receiving so many aid deliveries in his home….

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Walled Baghdad Lives
Afif Sarhan, IOL Correspondent
Five years after the fall of Baghdad, residents of the Iraqi capital say life has never been the same. The capital of enlightenment and culture has become a big jail where huge concrete barriers are dividing neighborhoods, people and even families on along sectarian lines. “Baghdad, which one day was an inspiration for poets and writers, is an ugly and scary city today,” griped Issam Abdul Samad, 40, a biologist and resident of Baghdad. “I don’t recognize my city anymore and hope to see it as it was before, teeming with life and beauty.” The US army has walled off entire neighborhoods in Baghdad with building-sized concrete walls to much protest from the locals…

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Video: Fourteen-year-old girl killed in Israeli raid – 27 Apr 08
AlJazeeraEnglish
A day after rejecting a truce offered by Hamas, Israel has carried out two airstrikes on Gaza. A 14-year-old girl – said to be the daughter of a Hamas leader – was also killed during an Israeli incursion into the town of Beit Lahiya. At least eight others were wounded. From Gaza, David Chater reports…

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Report: IOF troops killed 60 Palestinians including 16 children in April
Palestinian Information Center
The Mizan center for human rights reported Saturday that the IOF troops had killed since the beginning of April until this Saturday morning 60 Palestinian citizens including 16 children and wounded 120 others. With these new statistics, the number of Palestinians killed by the IOF troops since the beginning of this year reached 341 victims. In a statement received by the PIC, the center condemned the Israeli occupation for its increasing use of mass punishment against the Gaza Strip through slashing quantities of fuel supplies allowed into the Strip, pointing out that such actions seriously undermine human rights and are incompatible with the protection afforded by international humanitarian law for civilians under occupation…

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Israel “Orphans” Al-Khalil Kids, Again
Ola Attallah, IOL Correspondent
An Israeli army order to shut down two major Islamic charities in the West Bank is leaving thousands of Palestinian orphans in the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) to the unknown. “What will we do,” asked nine-year-old Ahmed. “Will we sleep and eat on the street.” The Israeli army has ordered the closure and evacuation of the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS) and the Muslim Youth Society (MYS) in Al-Khalil on claims of supporting “terrorism”. “Thousands of orphans will be the victim of the closure,” Hani Al-Maqdasi, a teacher at an ICS-run school, said. “How those orphans will live and who will cater for them?” The ICS provides shelter and care for more than 4,000 needy families and 300 orphans, according to the Popular Committee for Support of Orphans…

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Video: Soothing…
Layla Anwar, Uncensored Arabwomanblues
A latin jazzy version of the traditional Iraq song “Fog Al Nakhal” by Ilham Al-Madfai. The original is by Nazem Al-Ghazali here …

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Fighting in Sadr City Cuts Short Effort to Collect Trash
ERICA GOODE, NYTimes
Thirty trucks rolled down the main streets of Sadr City on Saturday morning, sent in to begin shoveling trash after a parliamentary delegation visited the Shiite neighborhood and expressed concerns that fighting had sidelined basic services. But a little more than an hour after the city crews went to work, clashes broke out between Iraqi soldiers and militia fighters loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and the trucks turned around and went home again…On Friday, the speaker of Parliament said that a committee made up of members from all political blocs would approach Mr. Maliki on Saturday to discuss how the situation in Sadr City could be improved, but the meeting did not take place. Iraqi government officials have said that they cannot tell if Mr. Sadr’s call for unity on Friday was genuine, because the tenor of his statements changes from day to day…

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This land was theirs
Hannah Mermelstein, The Electronic Intifada
On 20 March 1941, Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund wrote: “The complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer.” On this day in 1948, almost two months before the first “Arab-Israeli war” technically began, the 1,125 inhabitants of the Palestinian village Umm Khalid fled a Haganah military operation. Like their brethren from more than 500 villages, they likely thought they would return to their homes within a few weeks, after the fighting blew over and new political borders were or were not drawn…

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Isolation driving Guantanamo detainees insane: Will APA act?
Stephen Soldz
The New York Times today reminds us of the truly horrifying conditions at the Guantanamo prison. The Times reports on claims that solitary confinement in their 8? by 12? metal cells with no windows and nothing to do but read the Koran for 22 hours a day is literally driving many detainees insane. This situation is being raised by lawyers for detainees indicted for war crimes as the lawyers claim that their clients are unable to concentrate and aid the defense in preparation for their upcoming trials. By many definitions, treatment that drives people insane would constitute “torture.” But, when the US ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, they adopted reservations to the treaty that restricted the definition of torture to potentially exclude such cases…

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Activists hang up on Motorola
Adri Nieuwhof, The Electronic Intifada
In March of this year, the US Campaign to End the Israeli occupation launched its newest corporate accountability campaign: “Hang Up on Motorola.” Motorola Incorporated and its fully owned subsidiary Motorola Israel benefit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Present in Israel since 1964, Motorola supplies the Israeli army with equipment. The campaign was launched because the company failed to respond to the concerns of US activists. Therefore, the campaign demands that Motorola ends its production and sales of all products to Israel that support the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, now in its 41st year…

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Mosul hit by multiple suicide bombs
Aljazeera.net
Three suicide bombers and a car bomb have struck the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, killing at least nine people and wounding 31 others, police said. Clashes, meanwhile, continued on Saturday in the capital Baghdad’s Sadr City district between Mahdi Army fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader, and US-backed Iraqi forces. In Mosul’s worst attack, authorities said a suicide car bomber targeting a police patrol in the al-Mustashfa district blew himself up, killing six people, including two policemen, and wounding five, three of them police….

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Israeli Foreign Ministry Hosted Leading Wikipedia Editor
Dissident Veteran for Peace
From the Jerusalem Post of December 8, 2007: In an acknowledgement of the importance that the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has in shaping opinion, the Foreign Ministry is bringing one of its leading editors, David Shankbone, to Israel next week. According to a communiqué put out by the ministry, Shankbone has carried out dozens of interviews of US personalities for Wikipedia, including presidential candidates, religious leaders, rock stars and journalists. Shankbone will be visiting within the framework of a delegation of technology writers being brought to Israel by the Foreign Ministry and the America-Israel Friendship League…

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Conservatives dominate after Iran parliament runoffs
ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
Conservatives consolidated their control of Iran’s legislature in runoff elections but moderates within the bloc opposed to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged as a stronger force, according to final results released Saturday. The conservative bloc is divided between supporters of the hardline president and opponents critical of his handling of the economy and the nuclear standoff with the West…

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Iraqi lawmaker accuses U.S. forces of using prohibited weapons in Sadr City attacks
Voices of Iraq
An Iraqi legislator accused the U.S. forces on Saturday of using “internationally-banned weapons” during the military operations in the eastern Baghdad district of Sadr City. “Cogent evidence were shown by the criminal investigations and forensics’ reports that the occupation forces have used fissile arms during the bombardment of Sadr City,” Liqaa Al Yassin, a member of parliament from the Sadrist bloc, or Iraqis loyal to Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, told Aswat al-Iraq – Voices of Iraq – (VOI)….

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Abbas to leave Washington “empty handed”
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, said that his talks with the US President, George Bush, and US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, have failed in achieving any positive results. Abbas stated that the talks failed to address the core issues of an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and a halt of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. The president added that he will be heading back to the Palestinians territories “with no, or little to show”…

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Remembering the past
Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly
…It takes more than seminars and conferences to resurrect ways of thinking. Renovation is a process undertaken by individuals at the intersection between the needs imposed by the socio-historical process and the course of the history of ideas. One of the most pressing needs is for thinkers of the type that embraced the concept of the “Arab idea” and who made their mark in the first half of the 20th century. Conferences and seminars will not produce them, just as they will fail to produce any other kinds of innovative thinkers. Ultimately the task of renewal falls upon the individual who must engage in a creative intellectual process…

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14-year-old girl killed by Israeli troops in northern Gaza
Ma’an News
Israeli forces killed a 14-year-old girl, Maryam Tal’at Ma’rouf, and injured her mother, Samyah Ma’rouf, along with six others during an incursion in Beit Layiha, in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, witnesses said. Israeli special forces, with helicopters hovering overhead, invaded Beit Layiha at dawn, surrounding the house of Hamas leader Samyah Ma’rouf. Witnesses said the Israeli troops opened fire on the house, killing the child. Israeli troops engaged in a heavy exchange of fire with Palestinian fighters in the area. The Israeli forces withdrew at 7:30am after seizing Tal’at Ma’rouf….

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Iraqi oil pipeline blown up again
BBC News
An oil pipeline south of Baghdad has been blown up, wounding at least eight security guards, Iraqi police say. The blast, near the town of Iskandiriya, caused a large fire and disrupted the flow of crude oil to refineries in the south of Iraq. The pipeline carries fuel south from Baghdad’s Doura oil refinery. It was the second time in the past year the pipeline had been hit and the latest in a series of attacks on Iraqi oil refineries, blamed on insurgents…

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