Rogue State: Israeli Violations of U.N. Security Council Resolutions
by Jeremy R. Hammond
January 27, 2010 – Following is a list of United Nations Security Council resolutions directly critical of Israel for violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions, the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, international terrorism, or other violations of international law. Res. 57 (Sep. 18, 1948) – Expresses deep shock at the assassination of the U.N. Mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, by Zionist terrorists. Res. 89 (Nov. 17, 1950) – Requests that attention be given to the expulsion of “thousands of Palestine Arabs” and calls upon concerned governments to take no further action “involving the transfer of persons across international frontiers or armistice lines”, and notes that Israel announced that it would withdraw to the armistice lines…

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How surrendering Palestinian rights became the language of “peace”
Joseph Massad
January 27, 2010 – The 1993 Oslo agreement did not only usher in a new era of Palestinian-Israeli relations but has had a much more lasting effect in transforming the very language through which these relations have been governed internationally and the way the Palestinian leadership viewed them. Not only was the Palestinian vocabulary of liberation, end of colonialism, resistance, fighting racism, ending Israeli violence and theft of the land, independence, the right of return, justice and international law supplanted by new terms like negotiations, agreements, compromise, pragmatism, security assurances, moderation and recognition, all of which had been part of Israel’s vocabulary before Oslo and remain so, but also Oslo instituted itself as the language of peace that ipso facto delegitimizes any attempt to resist it as one that supports war, and dismisses all opponents of its surrender of Palestinian rights as opponents of peace. Making the language of surrender of rights the language of peace has also been part of Israel’s strategy before and after Oslo, and is also the language of US imperial power, in which Arabs and Muslims were instructed by US President Barack Obama in his speech in Cairo last June…

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Repudiating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Kim Petersen
January 27, 2010 – The extreme poverty in Haiti is widely acknowledged in the corporate media commentary, but for the most part, it is blamed on some flaw intrinsic to Haitians as a nation. When Haitians did gain a semblance of control over their fate, with the election of their first president, regimes in France, the United States, and Canada — even the United Nations — blocked Haitian sovereignty. The abduction and imposed exile of Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by US forces in collusion with French and Canadian forces is a violation of Article 55 of the UN Charter which calls for “… the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples…” When a people are denied the right to choose and keep their president, self-determination is rendered moot…

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Capital murder
P U L S E
January 27, 2010 – The current consensus in the international community is that East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since 1967, is the capital of a future Palestinian state. Israel’s unilateral annexation of territory to create expanded municipal boundaries for a ‘reunited’ Jerusalem was never recognised. Over the last forty-three years, Israel has created so-called ‘facts on the ground’ in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), in defiance of international law. Since the Madrid/Oslo peace process, successive Israeli governments have continued to colonise Palestinian land at the same time as conducting negotiations. The extent and scale of Israel’s illegal settlement project across the West Bank, as well as the road network, the Separation Wall, and other ways in which Israel maintains its rule over the OPT, has led some to believe that the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state is impossible…

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Sewage collapse threatens health of Palestinians in Gaza
Samira Quraishy E-mail Print
January 27, 2010 – Palestinians in Gaza have a lot to contend with, especially since the war launched by the Israeli Occupiers just over a year ago. With the loss of more than 1,400 Palestinian lives, most of whom were women and children, the near total destruction of whatever little infrastructure that remained and the general pillaging of the territory, Palestinians are once again faced with the prospect of rebuilding their lives in the besieged Gaza Strip. However, because of the ongoing Israeli blockade on essential materials, the Palestinians have not been able to carry out any reconstruction of their houses, hospitals, schools and the local infrastructure, including the power station and sewage treatment plants. Sewage disposal has become a huge problem all over Gaza, with leaks onto farmland and into nearby water sources leading to pollution and less fertile soil, which in turn has led to poor harvests..

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The Israeli Occupation Demolishes 30 Residential and Agricultural Structures in Khirbit Tana
The Land Research Center – LRC
January 27, 2010 – People in Khirbit Tana live a very simple life; they live in primitive houses built out of very simple materials including lumber, metal plates, stone, and mud. Furthermore, some of them live in tents or still living in caves. They have settled on the mountains and valleys of the Jordan Valley for a long time. The life in Khirbit Tana is so primeval; there is neither electricity nor a water network. Certainly, there isn’t any telecommunication or cellular communication networks available in the area. These farmers inherited the lands for generations. They have been exploiting it and using it for cultivation and cattle rising despite the hard conditions and the lack of water. However, the Israeli Occupation Army has been attempting to strangle the people living in the Jordan Valley since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967. The Occupation Army expropriated their lands, killed their cattle, took over their water sources, etc…

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Habash will always be the Icon for Freedom
Yousef Abudayyeh
January 27, 2010 – Two years ago today Dr. George Habash’s body left us, and since then, many books have been published about this legend El Hakeem (the doctor and the wise in Arabic), who became a beacon to freedom fighters worldwide and an Icon of steadfastness for humanity, democracy and goodwill. Dr. Habash was a visionary and a complete around pure person. And even though all of the ideals that El Hakeem stood for since he was forced out of his Palestinian town, Lidd as a youngster, will always hold true and they will be appreciated and much understood by Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, the mechanism for implementing these ideals is still either out of order or rusty…

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Gaza fishermen risk lives for survival
Erin Cunningham, Foreign Correspondent
January 27, 2010 – While the rest of the Gaza Strip is deep in slumber, Fathi Sayadi, 30, and his brother, Hatem, 26, steal away under the cover of darkness and into neighbouring Egyptian waters. Using small, dinghy-style boats purchased especially for their covert missions, the Sayadis slip across the border with Egypt, returning to the Gaza Strip with their contraband just before dawn. But, as Israel often claims, they are not using their boats to smuggle weapons into the Hamas-run territory. They are instead among a growing number of impoverished fishermen crossing the Gaza-Egypt maritime border to buy fresh fish from the country’s nearby port cities and Egyptian fishermen out at sea…

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US Marines in Haiti: Back to colonialism
Bill Van Auken
January 27, 2010 – The US media’s coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti has increasingly included articles and broadcast reports extolling the supposed humanitarian role of US soldiers and Marines in the Caribbean country. They generally describe how “combat-hardened” veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are lending a helping hand to the survivors of the earthquake. Some of this reporting seems aimed at countering growing international criticism of the US militarization of the response to the Haitian disaster, which has given priority to rushing in combat-equipped troops over the provision of medical supplies, food and water desperately needed to save lives…

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Britain ‘complicit in mistreatment and possible torture’ says UN
Human rights report indicates clear evidence of UK role in secret detention of British Muslims
Ian Cobain
January 27, 2010 – United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that the British government has been complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of several of its own citizens during the “war on terror”. In a report published today that will make difficult reading for ministers who repeatedly denied the UK’s involvement in torture, UN officials have indicated that there is clear evidence of the UK’s role in the secret detention overseas of several British Muslims…

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Why are they really demonstrating in Sheikh Jarrah?
Ir Amin
January 27, 2010 – In the last few weeks, the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah was featured in the headlines in Israel and abroad as a result of weekly demonstrations that take place in protest of the evacuation of Palestinian families from their homes and the entry of Jewish Israeli settlers into their homes. As a result of the hard-lined policy that the Jerusalem police have taken towards the demonstrators and the arrest of dozens of them, a significant part of the public discourse about this matter revolves around freedom of expression and the severe harm to the right to demonstrate in a democratic state. Along side this principled and important discussion, this short survey seeks to clarify the historical process of this matter until the issuing of the evacuation order, as well as the current political implications…

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The Kidnapping of Haiti
By John Pilger
January 27, 2010 — The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training. The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated…

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US Supreme Court rules against Mumia Abu-Jamal
By Hiram Lee
January 27, 2010 – …In the years since his 1982 conviction, more and more evidence has come to light pointing toward Abu-Jamal’s innocence. Major witnesses in the case against him have recanted their testimony and alleged that police threatened their lives if they did not testify against Abu-Jamal. In 1999, a man named Arnold Beverly swore in a signed affidavit that he himself had killed officer Daniel Faulkner as part of a hit ordered by corrupt Philadelphia police officers. There is every indication that Abu-Jamal has been the victim of a police frame-up…

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Haiti On Our Minds
Mumia Abu-Jamal
January 27, 2010 – … Haiti, we are informed by the corporate media, is the poorest nation in the West. We are never told however, how it got that way. How many of us know that the U.S. brutally occupied Haiti, and stayed there for over 20 years? Or that Haiti, which had the temerity to defeat not one, not two, but three colonial armies (the French, the British, and the Spanish), was forced to pay France billions of dollars in reparations for 200 years — the first and only time in history that a victor in war had to pay back the nation it defeated!? Haiti isn’t just poor; it’s been impoverished by a global system of exploitation and a plantation capitalist economy that was designed as a sanction for Black Liberation…

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Holocaust memorial invite to Palestinian MK raises storm
By Jonathan Cook
January 27, 2010 – A Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament has sparked controversy in Israel over his decision to join an official Israeli delegation commemorating International Holocaust Day at a Nazi death camp in Poland. Mohammed Barakeh will be the only Palestinian in a contingent of Israeli parliamentarians and government ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, at Auschwitz to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Barakeh has reported receiving a spate of hate mail, including a death threat, since he was invited to the remembrance service by the speaker of the Knesset, or the parliament, over the opposition of many right-wing politicians…

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Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power
Chris Floyd
January 27, 2010 – Yet another day, yet another bout of liberal handwringing over yet another jilting by Barack Obama. This time, their hero has let them down with his planned freeze on “discretionary” spending. (Which doesn’t include funding for the war machine and the security organs, of course; as always, that’s “imperative” spending – we are allowed no “discretion” whatsoever when it comes to gorging our fat cats on blood money and fear-profiteering.) Tuesday morning saw no less than five major pieces on Salon.com decrying Obama’s “panic,” his unworkable “gimmick” which will “doom the economic recovery,” his “farce” in repeating Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 mistake of cutting spending too soon and prolonging the Great Depression, and Obama’s “cynicism” in sending out his message-massagers to liberal outlets to assure the (dwindling) faithful that he’s not really going to cut any worthy programs – assertions that Republican will eagerly seize upon, and which will boomerang as rank betrayals of his political base when they turn out to be false…

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A Thought on Chilcot Legality
Hussein Al-alak, The Iraq Solidarity Campaign
January 27, 2010 – What a revalation it must be, to find that seven years after the illegal invasion of Iraq, the powers that be and their followers, have since discovered that a war of aggression is the ultimate war crime. To claim that Labour and their band of mass murderers are “slow”, is an insult to anyone who has the slightest learning disability, when you think that Britain signed up to Nuremberg as a result of the Second World War and pledged itself to uphold the principles which have fundamentally brought war criminals to justice…

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Hamas prepares to sue Israel for organ theft
Ma’an News
January 27, 2010 – The de facto government in the Gaza Strip began collecting the testimonies of families whose sons allegedly had their organs harvested by Israeli soldiers, Gaza Minister of Justice Muhammad Faraj Al-Ghoul said Wednesday. “We have started collecting documents and information which prove that the Israeli occupation has stolen the body parts of martyrs. We intend to prepare a complete legal file to be used in suits against the Israeli government in international courts,” Al-Ghoul told reporters in Gaza…

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Right from the horse’s mouth
Jeremy Scahill
January 27, 2010 – LAST WEEK, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that Blackwater is operating in Pakistan. In an interview on Express TV, Gates, who was visiting Islamabad, said, “They [Blackwater and another private security firm, DynCorp] are operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,” according to a DoD transcript of the interview. “There are rules concerning the contracting companies. If they’re contracting with us or with the State Department here in Pakistan, then there are very clear rules set forth by the State Department and by ourselves.”…

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Karzai Restores Gen. Dostum to Position as Army Chief
Jason Ditz
January 27, 2010 – Back again like a bad penny, one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, has been restored to his position as Afghan Army Chief of Staff by President Hamid Karzai… Gen. Dostum is generally believed to be responsible for the infamous Dasht-e Leili massacre in late 2001. Dostum, who was on the CIA’s payroll at the time, was given custody of prisoners captured during the US invasion, and had around 2,000 of the prisoners either shot or suffocated to death…

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Circles within circles around the Taliban
By M K Bhadrakumar
January 27, 2010 – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s attention is likely to be divided as hosts long-awaited international deliberations in London on the war in Afghanistan on Thursday. To be or not to be in the British capital was the question as Brown rushed to Belfast on Monday to “talk through the night” to save the Ulster power-sharing process from collapse. In a manner of speaking, power sharing also forms the agenda of the London conference, attended by some 60 countries. Cynics label the meeting a public relations stunt by Brown at a time when two-thirds of Britons oppose the Afghan war. However, the conference serves a purpose. An idea that seemed heretic until recently has tiptoed to the center of the conflict-resolution agenda in Afghanistan – devolving on reconciliation with the Taliban…

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