Bonsoir | يسعد مساكم

Happy Eid!

2008-12-10T21:23:00.003Z

The Siege on Gaza: We Share the Blame

2008-11-24T00:00:00.004Z

النسخة العربية هنا

As an international community, we all share the responsibility for the ongoing brutal siege on Gaza, and not until we utilise all possible means of peaceful and nonviolent resistance shall we hope for a close end of that siege.

Akram Awad

Monday 24 November 2008

There is not much to say about the Holocaust of Gaza’s people -assuming that the reader has at least followed the media coverage of what is happening in the traumatised Strip-. It comes as no surprise that Gazan's have resorted to euthanasia to end the lives of thousands of newly hatched chicks, for even Gazan birds would prefer dying with honour over being victims of starvation. There is nothing exceptional about Gazans keeping their children alive with animal feeds, because even those who know the least about Gaza are aware that this is only one of the means used by its people to save the whole region from a definite explosion. The only shocking aspect of the whole current scene is that as much as Gazans are trying to convince their children that this life has at least some goodness that makes it worth clinging to, as much as the world strives to disprove such theories, and establish in the minds of those children that this life and world deserve no more than the curse of Gaza.

So as not to let the reader imagine that the world above belongs to another planet, I must make it clear that the world I’m referring to is actually “Us”: You and me. It’s easy for us to mourn Gaza’s people, and it’s easy to pray for their patience and persistence, and it’s easy to condemn the Israeli slaughter of 1.5 million people in Gaza. What seems impossible, though, is our confession that we are the ones besieging Gaza, and that all our condemnations, protests, prayers and writings -unless accompanied by genuine acts on the ground- are a bashful reflection of our insouciance toward the ongoing massacre against Palestinians in Gaza, and the lack of any desire from our side to take serious and practical actions to break the siege on the strip.

A reader may wonder: “genuine acts on the ground! Me?!” Their wonder will disappear as soon as we come to a realisation that peaceful and nonviolent resistance to injustices throughout history has been as effective as armed resistance –if not superior in many cases-. Let’s remind ourselves and remind Egypt -Israel's partner in the shedding of Palestinian blood in Gaza- that Egypt itself wouldn’t have gained its independence from colonialism in 1923 without the 1919’s revolution -which was peaceful in most respects- and the civil disobedience that followed the arrest of the leader of the Wafd Party, Saad Zaghloul. It was that revolution which finally forced the colonisers to surrender to the will of the Egyptians and declare Egypt’s independence. Let us also remember that Mahatma Gandhi's peaceful non-cooperation movement in India between 1920 and 1922 and then his famous Salt March in 1930 are what broke the back of British colonialism and forced it to recognise the independence of India in 1947. The determination of a man who just entered his seventh decade to walk a distance of 390 km in order to reach the Arabian Sea and break the British Raj salt laws, preventing the extraction of salt, may be seen by many as an act of madness, but when this old man attracts more than sixty thousand Indians on his way to the coastal village of Dundee and inspires millions to join the disobedience, the questioning of the fruitfulness of the pilgrimage to salt becomes no more than a sort of sophistry.

History is full of examples of peaceful and nonviolent resistance methods that the ninety year Palestinian struggle –since the Balfour declaration– could have learnt from. So why is it that Palestinians have not yet managed to achieve what others have achieved in the same, or shorter, time span? It won't be far from truth to attribute the success of other nations’ struggles to their unity around one focal idea and their dedication to realising it. If Palestinians carefully diagnose their failure to achieve freedom then they would most probably trace the reasons back to the lack of those very attributes. I’m almost confident that Palestinians never agreed on one focal target; if you ask Palestinians for their thoughts on the best methods to achieve their freedom I trust you would be able to collect enough material to fill several volumes with scarcely any consistency between those methods. To stay within the article’s theme I shall say: The national consensus and participation of all sectors of the population are necessary conditions for the success of any initiative of nonviolent resistance that can be considered synonymous - or even a substitute - for armed resistance.

We started with the siege on Gaza and here we are talking about nonviolent resistance, so what’s the point? What I’m trying to say is that peaceful and nonviolent resistance benefits from an added value compared to armed resistance; that it is not limited to a certain segment of the nation, and that it allows for the contribution and involvement of all peoples of the world - as well as the victimised nation itself -. The people of Gaza have prompted us to launch a non-violent resistance against the blockade when they rebelled against the siege and dismantled the separation wall on the Egyptian border to breathe in the scent of freedom for a few days before Egypt forced them to return to their big prison and suffocate inside their cells. Only a few understood the Palestinian hint at the time and started developing the Idea, and so emerged the Free Gaza movement (www.freegaza.org) and its brilliant idea of running vessels to break the siege on the Gaza Strip by sea. Despite their limited financial and physical capabilities, the small group succeeded in proving the feasibility of their idea by repeating it three times, the latest of which was the boat carrying parliamentarians who resorted to the genius idea after they were prevented by the Egyptian regime from entering to Gaza by land.

It is enough of a pride for the Free Gaza movement that they innovated the “Freedom Boats” idea and implemented it on the ground. What remains is the most important part: the collective action: by me and you, our families, neighbours, friends, colleagues, and all those who believe in the righteousness of the Palestinian struggle and that they too, share the responsibility to achieve the freedom of Palestine. The Freedom Boats can move from being just a nice idea to an effective nonviolent resistance weapon only when the monthly trips become a continuously active and regular ship line, and when a fleet of ships replace the small boats, and when the programme organisers are forced to delay the travel of some passengers due to the overbooking of volunteers from all parts of the globe, and when each of us becomes a partner in accomplishing the idea by contributing toward the financing of the cruises or covering the expenses of volunteers; only then can we hope for a near collapse of the Israeli siege on Gaza, a collapse that we achieve with our own blood, tears and sweat rather than hopelessly begging for the sympathy of politicians and international bodies.

The decision to continue or end the siege on Gaza is neither an Israeli, Egyptian nor International decision; it is our –and only our- decision. If we are to accept the facts on the ground we should have no reason to expect neither a little sympathy from the Israeli occupier, nor to move the heart of the Egyptian regime. On the other hand, by instating new facts on the ground through nonviolent resistance Israelis will have no option but to accept that the end of their savageness and the freedom of Palestine is definitely on its way, and the Egyptians will be reminded once more of their leader, Saad Zaghloul’s, saying "Right is above might and the nation is above the government."

Israel: Begging for Honour

2008-11-16T18:09:00.005Z

النسخة العربية هنا

Reports about the Queen's conferral of knighthood on Israeli President Shimon Peres endanger the Royals' reputation and add a new category eligible for the honorary title: war criminals.

Akram Awad

Monday, November 17 2008

It seems that the Zionist pro-Israeli blackmailing tactics against the Royals have done the trick – again. Latest news reports from Israel are confirming that the Israeli embassy's desperate begging for a knighthood title to be honoured by Queen Elizabeth to the Israeli President Shimon Peres during his visit to the UK this week has finally been answered⁽¹⁾. Another report published on the Daily Express⁽²⁾ earlier this month leaked information about the Queen's rejection of the Israeli bidding for the honorary title. The report quoted a British Official stating, "It's not going to happen. There is no knighthood." It is, therefore, still too early to confirm the reliability of the Israeli reports, as they may simply be part of the dirty campaign itself.

I should not be exaggerating when I claim that Mr. Peres is one of those few whose contribution to the Zionist project in Palestine and the sufferings of the Palestinians and Arabs has never stopped ever since the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-1949. His record⁽³⁾ includes his role in searching for talented officers to join the Haganah terrorist militias - Ben Gurion's military gang and the predecessor of the Israeli army - which led the acts of terrorism, killing and forced expulsion against the Palestinians since 1947. Peres became a member of the Haganah's high command in May 1947 where he was responsible for manpower and arms purchases and production. So to call Peres “Israel's Dove of Peace” is not any different from calling the Devil an "Angel of Evil".

The most distinguished war crime of the 1994's Noble Peace Prize laureate was his direct responsibility as a Prime Minister for the shelling of the UN forces headquarters in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon in 1996. More than 800 Lebanese civilians sought refuge in the building to escape Israeli fire, yet the UN flag was not enough to stop the Israeli thirst for blood. 106 people were killed in the massacre and at least 110 were seriously injured. Despite the UN investigation conclusions⁽⁴⁾ that the attack could never be referred to a technical or procedural error, the International Community failed so far to prosecute Peres and bring him to trial as a war criminal. Instead, The UN General Assembly debated whether Israel should be charged for the repair of the attacked compound - and the vote almost failed -, as if it was the United Nations of Bricks!

The Israeli President is one of the strongest advocates for bringing the Iranian nuclear program to a halt at any cost even if military intervention is required. Since the first time I wrote about this issue two years ago⁽⁵⁾many things have changed but one has remained the same; The Israeli military nuclear program remains intact, and the man who prides himself for making that program possible is still allowed to blatantly criticise Iran's nuclear program and threaten to destroy it, "The president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map," Peres once stated⁽⁶⁾. If it hadn’t been for Shimon Peres convincing the French in 1957 to help build the Israeli secret nuclear reactor, Dimona, the Israeli nuclear program could have never seen the light of day. Apart from few slips of the tongue, the Israelis still insist upon denying the existence of their nuclear program and their possession of hundreds of nuclear warheads. The world's silence on Israel's nuclear arsenal led the latter to safely conclude the following moral of the story: “We should be allowed to do whatever we want as long as we lie about it.”

I'll go back to the word "exaggeration". Questioning the dedication of Peres to the Zionist project in Palestine - all Palestine - does not stand as an option when we listen to the man's statements echoing the racist evil nature of Zionism. Peres strongly criticised⁽⁷⁾ the International Court of Justice after its ruling to de-legalise the construction of the Israeli apartheid wall/barrier in the West Bank. Nor was he ashamed of expressing his racist concerns about the "demographical danger" threatening Israel due to the fast growth of the Arab population compared to the Jewish population. "If a division of territory is not effected within a decade, the Arab minority will have become an Arab majority. Israel will no longer be a Jewish state - or (it will) stop being a democratic state,"⁽⁸⁾ Peres once argued for the need of a Palestinian state to complete the unfinished job of cleansing the rest of the Palestinians from their land in 1948's occupied Palestine. While the illegal settlements in the West Bank have been a major obstacle toward any peace agreement in Palestine, Peres was the first to fight for the implantation of the first Jewish settlement, Kedumim, in 1970s in the heart of the 1967 occupied West Bank as well as the set up of the security zone⁽⁹⁾ which makes up more than 45 percent of the West Bank.

If the Israelis' knighthood news reports prove themselves right this week, Buckingham Palace will score a point for trying to resist the blackmail but will also lose so much of its reputation. There should be someone in there - I hope - to spot that winning the title of the "Most Attractive Destination for War Criminals" isn't really worth it!

⁽¹⁾ http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1037259.html

⁽²⁾http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/69249/Queen-to-snub-Israeli-knighthood-bid

⁽³⁾http://www.zionism-israel.com/bio/Peres_biography.htm

⁽⁴⁾http://www.undemocracy.com/S-1996-337/page_6

⁽⁵⁾http://www.akramawad.com/search?q=israel+nuclear+arsenal

⁽⁶⁾http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1145961301962

⁽⁷⁾http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-2944632,00.html

⁽⁸⁾http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2003/10/20084912575844881.html

⁽⁹⁾http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/22362

2008-06-27T13:41:00.004+01:00

Join Us on the 29th of June Day of Action: "Israel: 60 Years of Shame"

On Sunday, the 29th of June, the Zionists and advocates of Israel in the UK are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel (i.e. the Palestinian Nakba) in central London with a huge parade followed by a festival at Trafalgar Square.

The Palestinian Forum in Britain (PFB), the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Palestine Twinning Network, NUS Black Students Campaign (NUS-BSC), Action Palestine, Friends of Al-Aqsa, FOSIS and other organisations will be holding a number of activities on the day to protest against this shameless dancing on Palestinian graves. The main two are:

1- "Israel: 60 Years of Shame" bus tour in London

Three double-decker buses will drive around central London, covered with banners highlighting the 60 years of Nakba and Israel's record of shame and crimes against the Palestinians from 1948 up to date.

Join us on the buses and say it loud and clear to Israel and its supporters "SHAME ON YOU!"

Buses will leave from Malet Street at 11:00 am (Nearest Tube stations are Russell Square, Goodge Street, Euston and Euston Square). Please be there on time.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=malet+street,+london&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=10.706311,33.310547&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=16&iwloc=addr

2- "Shame on You" Vigil next to Trafalgar Square

A vigil will take place from 2:30 pm outside the South African House. This is the first building overlooking Trafalgar Square on the Strand (visit the following link for the location's map:

Join us there and let us say it all together:

"ISRAEL, SHAME ON YOU",

"PALESTINE, OUR HEARTS ARE WITH YOU"

and

"PALESTINIAN REFUGEES, SOONER OR LATER, YOU WILL RETURN!"

The Palestinian Nakba - A friends of Al-Aqsa Report

2008-05-24T16:43:00.006+01:00

The Palestinian Nakba, 60 Years of Catastrophe 1948 - 2008 A Friends of Al-Aqsa Publication

To mark 60 years since the Palestinian Nakba, Friends of Al-Aqsa have produced a publication titled 'The Palestinian Nakba, 60 Years of Catastrophe'.

This is being disctributed for free. If you would like to receive a printed copy, please send us a SAE to the value of £0.70. Post to: Friends of Al-Aqsa, PO Box 5127, Leicester, LE2 0WU.

Visit www.aqsa.org.uk to keep up to date with developments in the occupied territories.

To view the complete report online click here.

(Hat tip to Rajnaara for the excellent work)

Palestinian Nakba 101: The eBook

2008-05-15T21:05:00.007+01:00

Click on the image to launch the e-book

The Parade of Shame

2008-03-20T10:39:00.000Z

Akram Awad

Thursday March 20, 2008

It takes one a lot of courage to be brave enough (read unashamed) to celebrate a 60 year history of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, racism and war crimes. And it looks like the main Jewish bodies in the UK have decided to work hand-in-hand, taking their pride in that history to a new level this year by organising the “Salute to Israel” parade in London next June.

According to the organisers, the parade will demonstrate “affirmation of solidarity with and support of Israel”. This kind of unconditional support has always been the trend for both the organising and the supporting bodies of the parade. These include: Jewish Leadership Council, the Board of Deputies, the CST, JNF UK, Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, Manchester ZCC, UJIA, UJS, Zionist Federation, Zionist Youth Council, the Movement for Reform Judaism, and the United Synagogue.

Celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the declaration of Israel as a State also means, undoubtedly, taking pride in the horrific crimes committed by the Jewish militias (which later became the Israeli Defence Force) against the indigenous Palestinians in the years 1947 till 1949, which paved the way for the existence of Israel. The systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians preceding the foundation of the State resulted in dozens of massacres, the destruction or Judaisation of more than 400 towns and villages, and the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians who now number 6-7 million refugees scattered all around the world. These figures are not only enough to make any Israeli ashamed of their country, but they are also sufficient by themselves to build the case against the right of Israel to exist.

Thus, it is striking to witness the major Jewish political and religious bodies in the UK praising a country with such a history, offending the memory of thousands of victims of Israeli terrorism, the millions of Palestinians in the UK and around the world, and the British people, as a whole, who take pride in promoting and defending fundamental human rights and ensuring mutual respect between the different groups making up this nation. Embedding the Union Jack within the Israeli flag in the parade’s logo is just another example of how ignorant the organisers are to the values of the British nation. I believe that it’s not questionable that neo-Nazis should not be permitted to promote their fascist beliefs by using the British flag with a Swastika. Promoting an illegal occupier and the only lasting apartheid regime on earth is not any better.

However, it is not just the pre-State history that is a source of shame for Israel. The military occupation of the rest of Palestine in 1967 (i.e. the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza strip) is an illegal act which, for the last 40 years, was condemned in dozens of resolutions by the UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, International Court of Justice and Human Rights Council, of which Israel insists to abide by none. Add to this, the Apartheid practices imposed on the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are not limited to the Wall, checkpoints, settlements, imprisoning and water supply discrimination.

Moreover, the “only democracy in the Middle East” is probably the best example of what an extremely racist State can be. With discriminatory policies that favour Jewish citizens over Arab citizens and with the Law of Return which allows anyone with Jewish origin to become an Israeli citizen while denying the right of return for Palestinian refugees, there is hardly any room for doubt that Israel is a racist State.

The organisers of the “Salute to Israel” parade themselves are not remote from the above course of events. Some even played a key role in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The JNF, for instance, participated actively in the destruction of Palestinian villages, the Judaisation of others and the building of settlements. Nowadays, its main role is to cover up for the ethnic cleansing crimes by planting parks on ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages, all financed by charity money received through its offices around the world, including its UK-based registered charity, JNF UK.

The Union of Jewish Students in the UK, UJS, has taken a more active part in the military aspects of the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, by recruiting for the Israeli Army in the summer of 2007 and encouraging British Jews to do their national service in the Israeli Army “where it is really needed”. This is in breach of the UK Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 which considers it a crime for a British subject to enlist in the army of a foreign nation that is at war with any country that the UK is at peace with.

UJIA is the organisation responsible for encouraging and assisting Jews from the UK to immigrate to Israel i.e., ensuring the implementation of the racist Aliyah (Return) laws. This is of course in addition to funding the UJS and other organisations which strive to justify Israel’s crimes to the British public.

The examples of the involvement of the parade’s organisers in the crimes of the Zionist State are endless. However, what irritates more than anything else is watching the same people claiming to work for justice and peace while openly declaring themselves as believers of the racist Zionist ideology and supporting the Zionist State’s crimes. What sort of trust are faith leaders expected to show toward the United Synagogue during inter-faith activities when the latter salutes, out of all countries of the world, a country which John Dugard accused of committing war crimes against the Palestinians? Likewise, how are we expected to receive the UJS’s passion to save Darfur when all what they do, on the other hand, is to praise Israel in every possible occasion and suppress all the voices calling for an end to the Israeli illegal occupation and apartheid in Palestine? One phrase is enough to describe the Jewish bodies organising and supporting the “Salute to Israel” Parade: A BUNCH OF HYPOCRITES.

The bunch of hypocrites have classified themselves as Zionist organisations which care unlimitedly about Israel and couldn’t care less about the reputation of the Jewish faith, which they are tarnishing by attaching themselves to a Divine faith that should be promoting the values of justice, equality and coexistence. The ball is now in the court of all those who stand for justice and cannot stand hypocrisy. The next time any of the parade’s organisers knocks on your door, a good “no, thank you” answer would be “Interesting to see an apartheid apologist playing the angel”!

The One & Only...

2008-03-17T13:27:00.006Z

This was just a "little" message that Palestine remains the core and central issue of the Middle East Crisis. [The World Against War Demo, London - March 15 2008] I hope the 135 square-meter message was clear enough!

And in action...

And for those who were still confused, the banner says it all...

[Hat tip to Laylatoot, Newworlddannie, Akanekal and Jeff for the great pics]

Palestine Quiz 3 - Nakba (1-3): The years before

2008-02-20T22:11:00.009Z

In order to create a justification for the crime of genocide they have committed against the Palestinian Arabs, the Zionists have tried to convince the world that Palestine was practically uninhabited, "A Land Without People, for a People without a Land." They created and propagated the myths that the Palestinian Arabs were nomads or seminomads without a culture and civilization, that the Palestinians had neither a national identity nor existence, that the Palestinians lacked an economic structure and roots in the land.

Take the quiz, do the math and find out for yourself if Palestine was really a land with no people left for people with a plan.

Take the PalQuiz 3 HERE

Good luck!

Can those creatures be human?!

2007-12-27T17:19:00.000Z

See what its like to live with Jewish Settlers (Colonisers) as your Neighbors. (Footage from Hebron, Palestine)

You can watch other footages about the daily sufferings of Palestinians in Hebron and Palestine at:

PaLoRaMa

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=jonyoutoobe

http://www.palestineremembered.com/...

For Your Information, the occupied Palestinian City of Hebron is home to more than 150,000 Palestinians and 400 implanted Jewish Settlers (safeguarded by thousands of Israeli Occupation Forces and Israeli Police)

HAPPY EID!

2007-12-19T12:08:00.001Z

Palestine Quiz 2 - U.S. Support of Israel

2007-12-12T12:34:00.000Z

How much does Israel cost the American taxpayer? Does US law protect USA or Israel? How blind is the US governments' backing of Israeli crimes?

Test your knowledge on the different aspects of the US support for Israel...

Take the PalQuiz 2 HERE

Good luck!

Leave your score in the comments

The Messages ... Now in Spanish & French

2007-05-28T11:26:00.000+01:00

Spanish Translation http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=51117

French Translation http://www.protection-palestine.org/article.php3?id_article=5090

(Hat tip to Carlos and Ana)

Origional Article

Part I http://www.akramawad.com/2007/05/messages-in-memory-of-nakba-part-1.html

Part II http://www.akramawad.com/2007/05/messages-in-memory-of-nakba-part-2.html

Palestine Quiz 1 - Palestinian Refugees

2007-05-21T21:59:00.000+01:00

Palestinians have experienced several periods of major displacement, beginning in 1947-48 war, followed by a second major displacement in the 1967 war. Additional displacement has resulted from Israeli government policies and practices inside Israel and in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories, including land confiscation, house demolition, revocation of residency status, and deportation.

The state of Israel opposes the return of Palestinian refugees based on the desire to maintain Israel as a ''Jewish state'' characterised by a solid demographic Jewish majority and Jewish control of the land.

This quiz aims to test your knowledge on the Palestinian refugees issue and to give you an insight into their unique 59-year struggle.

Click here to take the quiz now

Good luck!

Leave your score in the comments

Also, please leave any comments, suggestions or ideas for future quizzes in the comments section.

[UPDATE]

Total of 11,550 visitors took the quiz

Suggested references about the Palestinian refugees and the right of return:

http://www.al-awda.org/

http://prc.org.uk/

http://www.un.org/unrwa

http://palestineremembered.com/

http://arts.mcgill.ca/mepp/new_prrn

http://www.plands.org/

http://www.badil.org/

http://www.shaml.org/

http://www.rorcongress.com/

Palestine occupied Sheffield ... for one day

2007-05-20T13:24:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday, 12th of May, Sheffield city centre was occupied (legally) by pr0-Palestine activists from all around the North of England. The Palestine North rally was organised by Sheffield PSC in support of the Palestinians and their freedom and return. It had almost everything: A huge rally, Speakers, Dabkeh (Palestinian traditional dancing), Palestinian food, information stalls, Palestinian products stalls, Photo Exhibition, A massive model of the apartheid wall in West Bank. I even got to meet an old lady who just arrived from Palestine and turned out to be from my town and she knew my grandma!

The funniest, yet most irritating, part of the day was the Checkpoint Street Theatre. We all wanted to take part in the role play so we ended up waiting in a very long queue, and to make things worse it started raining heavily! The Israeli soldiers didn't allow us to find a shelter and the progress was deadly slow. The floor was full of fruits and vegetables as they emptied someone's basket and didn't allow him in with his harvested crops. I missed my university exam because the stubborn soldier insisted not to let me into the city with my expired ID card and ordered me to renew my ID in another city, which has been blocked by another checkpoint and no one was allowed in or out for almost three days.

That was just a role play. Reality is far more worse.

Here are some pics from my camera

Messages in Memory of the Nakba (Part 2)

2007-05-17T13:30:00.000+01:00

Akram Awad

Thursday, 17 May 2007

This year marks the 59th anniversary of the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe) in which the Zionist Jewish militias committed a horrendous number of massacres and crimes which led to the displacement of half of the Palestinian nation (around 750,000) from their villages and towns and the occupation of most of Palestine. In the memory of the Palestinian holocaust I have five messages that I would like to send to different people who have a lot to do with this continuing catastrophe: Palestinians living in Palestine, Palestinians living outside Palestine, Palestine solidarity movement activists, the international community and Jews worldwide. Part 1 of this article contained my message to the Palestinians. Part 2 carries my message to the rest of the world.

To the Palestine Solidarity movement activists

My third message goes to the Palestine solidarity movement activists around the world. The Palestinian nation salutes you for defending their rights, increasing the awareness of your people about the Palestinian cause and exposing the Israeli brutality and the evil face of Zionism. I can tell from my experience that there are non-Palestinians who are more Palestinian than some Palestinians. We are grateful for every single moment you spend for us and we will never forget your struggle with us.

I would just like to remind myself and you that the role of a solidarity movement is to defend the rights of a nation and mobilise people to support those rights. It is worrying though to notice a few examples where this red line is crossed by making compromises on behalf of the Palestinians and proposing "solutions" that drop some of the Palestinian rights. So that we don't lose the plot, we should always remind ourselves of our primary aim and that is to support all the Palestinians' rights (and not picking some and neglecting others). It is only the Palestinian nation -as a whole- that has the authority to decide for its future. We stood by the Black South Africans until the apartheid regime was dismantled. We did not impose solutions on them but supported the end of apartheid. Likewise, we should support all rights of the Palestinian nation including their right in their independent sovereign state and the right of all refugees to return to their original villages and towns and their right to compensation.

To the International community

My fourth message is for the international community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." It is ironic that this statement is also 59 years old and it's yet to see the light in this wild world. If you think you have no hand in the suffering of the Palestinians for 59 years -or even more- then you have to rethink about it.

Palestine was granted to the Zionist Jews through the Balfour declaration 90 years ago which was then followed by mass immigration of the Jews from Europe and USA to Palestine where their camps were secured by British forces. Although Britain had no right in the first place to offer the land of the Palestinians to someone else they still issued a white paper clarifying that the Jews had no right to form their own state in Palestine, and that is when Zionist terror escalated against both the Palestinians and the British -with the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem being one example of that terror-. When the British lost control of the Zionist Jewish terrorist groups they simply decided to leave the Palestinians to their fate and leave the country! By that time the Americans were the main source of aids and funds to the Zionist terror militias and supplied them with all their military needs including air fighters.

It was in that decade when the Holocaust was committed against the Jews and other ethnicities. The sympathy with the Jews led 33 states -of which the most were either European countries or controlled by major powers- to vote for the UN partition plan of Palestine in 1947. But hold on, what do the Palestinians have to do with all of this?! There is only one answer; European states recognised the suffering of the Jews but still didn't want to host them. This brings to my mind the Aliens Act of 1905 which was enacted by the then-prime minister Arthur Balfour -Yes the same Balfour!- to restrict the immigration of Jews to the UK.

We didn't vote for Balfour, the British people did. We didn't vote for any foreign government that supported the Zionists before or after the declaration of their illegal state in 1948, the western nations did. Unfortunately, most of us only care about what the governments would do for us and ignore their support to the Zionists and their crimes. You have been paying taxes for ages; you probably received good health and social services in return, but how many times did you question the tax money redirected by your government to fund the killing of the Palestinians by the Israeli army? You enjoyed your freedom to vote for your representative in your Parliament, but only very few were caring enough to blame their governments for starving the Palestinians for practising their right to vote for a party other than what the Zionists prefer. Palestinians do not ask for anyone’s apology; All what they ask for is to help them end their catastrophe, which they had no hand in creating, and to support their freedom and their return to the land Zionists wouldn’t have taken without getting empowered by the US and many European governments.

Is it bliss to be ignorant? Not when it makes you involved in the crime. Your favourite shop is Marks & Spenser because it offers you good value for money, but then it is also your money that helps M&S to support Israel with hundreds of millions of US dollars every year. You open your bank account with Barclays, a bank which shamelessly sponsored the celebrations of "Israel's birthday", and you still justify it for yourself believing that closing your account won't make even a tiny difference. You will still insist to buy your makeup from Estee Lauder even when you are told that its Chairman, Ronald Lauder, is a Zionist working with the land-grabbing Jewish National Fund (JNF), opposing the right of return for Palestinians. What is worse is that you may be donating to the JNF charity in your country to help them erase any remaining signs of the Arab villages flattened by the Zionists since 1948. If you want to be passive and do nothing to help the Palestinians and pressure your government, the minimum I can ask you for is not to take part in their killing and daily suffering with your money… BOYCOTT!

To all Jews worldwide

My fifth and final message is dedicated to the Jews worldwide. Our problem is not with you; it's with Zionism. We lived in Palestine hundreds of years in peace and harmony as one Palestinian nation: Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze and others. We understand the suffering many of you had to undergo in Europe and the US but this should never give the Zionists the justification to cause another nation even worse suffering in your name. Muslims, Christians and Jews believe in the same God, a just and merciful God, a God who will never give one nation the right to expel another nation from their land and replace them, a God who will never allow a Jew to kill an Arab to secure a "Jewish state", a God whose wrath is sure to be provoked by the racist Zionist ideology and its adopters and implementers, specially when they claim to speak in the name of God.

As a Jew you may be thirsty to speak against Zionism, and I do understand the risks you will have to undertake considering the Zionist attempts to silence you, but believe me it's worth the risk. You won't be alone; the majority of silent Jews are non-Zionists, and all what you need to do is to break your silence and add your name to the honour list of Jewish heroes who dare to speak out for Judaism and against Zionism. It may sound a bit pragmatic for a Palestinian to encourage non-Zionist Jews to speak out the truth about their faith to unveil the lies of the Zionists who pretend to represent the Jews, but I'm sure even the non-Zionist Jew dreams of the day when, for people all over the world, the word "Judaism" becomes attached to peace, justice and equality instead of Zionism, racism, occupation, war and "Nakba".

Messages in Memory of the Nakba (Part 1)

2007-05-17T13:24:00.000+01:00

Akram Awad

Thursday, 17 May 2007

To Palestinians living in Palestine

My first message is to the Palestinians living in Palestine. Your struggle and resistance of the Zionist Israeli occupation and apartheid made you the role model for all freedom fighters and all those who seek justice around the world. We outside Palestine have always been proud of being Palestinians, not because of what we have done for our cause, but rather because of your steadfastness in the face of the Zionist terror that has been imposed on you for the last 59 years. We would love to stand side-by-side with you and face the Zionist occupation together in Palestine, but unfortunately this is out of our hands. The majority of Palestinians outside Palestine are refugees who are denied the right to return and, for those who are not, there is always a need for Palestinians to be all over the world in order to spread the message about the Palestinian struggle and to defend the Palestinian cause and rights wherever the Zionist propaganda twists facts and delivers a distorted picture about the history of the Palestinian struggle and the ongoing Israeli crimes against the Palestinians.

It took other nations hundreds of years to get rid of colonisation and gain their freedom. It took India four centuries to get its freedom and independence, and it took the Algerians 130 years to end the French colonisation. Palestine is no less than any of these and therefore we should not expect to pay a cheaper price for our freedom. Always bear in mind that life without dignity is worse than death, and life without freedom loses all its dignity. If you think that compromising parts of the nation's rights, fought for by three generations, will do you any good you are very much mistaken. There will always come a day when a new generation starts seeking their dignity and, once again, they will realise it is found in their freedom and their return to their home land. Neither the Israeli occupation nor its collaborators should let you down or drive you to give up your rights.

It is fate that every coloniser and occupier recruits collaborators from within the colonised nation to pave their way in. We heard about many examples in the past and the modern history, with Iraq probably being the most recent example. We also have them in Palestine, but this should never make you ashamed of being Palestinian because the moment a collaborator helps the enemy they lose their Palestinian identity. I have no doubt that the recent clashes in Palestine have been ignited and directed by the Zionists and their collaborators. But how are we going to identify them? It is not that difficult. I'll be very frank and reveal to you my simple approach to point them out. Question the loyalty of everyone who hugs a Zionist, whose hand is full of Palestinian blood. Question the loyalty of everyone who accepts military and logistic aid from the same countries starving the Palestinians. Question the loyalty of everyone whose militias are freely allowed in and out of Palestine while the Palestinians have to wait for days or even weeks on border points –and in several cases die from illness while waiting. Question the loyalty of everyone who says no to a temporary state but welcomes the road map, and says yes to the right of return but is willing to negotiate it and make compromises. To conclude my message to the Palestinians inside I shall say again: you made us proud of you for 59 years and this shall continue until we all declare a Palestinian state over the whole of Palestine.

To Palestinians living out of Palestine

My second message is for the Palestinians living outside Palestine. I shall remind myself and you that what makes someone a Palestinian is the Palestine deeply rooted in their heart. So a true Palestinian should live as a Palestinian no matter where they are, and will raise their family to appreciate the Palestinian culture, traditions and lifestyle because this is part of our struggle to preserve the Palestinian identity which the Zionists have been striving to erase ever since they took our land.

It is not a luxury, but rather an obligation, to educate people whom we live with about our cause, our rights, our history and our culture. No one is capable of speaking on behalf of the Palestinians better than the Palestinians themselves. This is conditional on having Palestinians who understand, and are able to communicate with, the communities they live amongst. Never assume others are going to be the ones to take on such a role; Let it be you. Educate yourself about your cause and don't be shy to speak out about the Palestinian struggle wherever you are. We always blame the world for not standing with us but we never asked ourselves if we have ever made an effort to tell the world what they should know about our just cause. Someone may keep saying something for ages but that will be useless if he speaks a language his audience do not understand!

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza strip are the ones involved in deciding on the best strategies and methods to physically resist the Israeli occupation on one hand, and to run the Palestinian community on the other hand. Palestinians may differ in their approaches to these issues and therefore it is legitimate and understandable that they form different parties and groups representing and promoting those approaches. Palestinians living outside Palestine have no reason or justification however, to split themselves into different camps. We should be an example of unity and harmony for we have one goal we all long to achieve: our freedom and return. A Palestinian living outside should always live and present themselves not as a member of Fatah, Hamas or any other party but only as a proud Palestinian.

A British Union recruits for the Israeli Army!

2007-05-13T15:55:00.000+01:00

Based on my personal experience in Leeds University and the National Union of Students (NUS), I couldn't agree more with the brave ex-Israeli Jewish academic Ilan Pappe when he accused Jewish campus groups in the UK and some Jewish students of being ""ambassadors of Israel". However I could never imagine that the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) is shameful enough to call the Jewish British students for "National Service" in Israel by voluntarily serving in the Israeli Occupation Army.

In their campaign for this summer's activities which was given the motto "Whatever you do this summer, do it in Israel with UJS", UJS offered Jewish students the chance to participate in the Sar-El program. The advert reads "Join students from around the world on a national project with the Israeli army. Spend 2 weeks volunteering with Israeli peers and make a difference where it is really needed!"

Sar-El is an Israeli Army unit which aims at recruiting volunteers from both Israel and the rest of the world to help the Israeli army. The majority of Sar-El volunteers serve in army bases and are assigned a variety of tasks which according to volunteers include " doing maintenance on tanks and heavy vehicles " and "refurbishing used or damaged military equipment, which saves Israel millions of dollars." During their "National Service" volunteers wear the Israeli army uniform and work alongside or under the direction of soldiers.

Although it is not a crime for a British citizen to serve in a foreign army, The Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 makes it a crime for a British subject to enlist in the army of a foreign nation that is at war with any country that the UK is at peace with. On the other hand Israel -since its foundation in 1948- has been in a continuous state of war with the Palestinians (or more accurately against them), the Lebanese and Syrians (whom Israel is occupying part of their lands since 1967) and with most Arab countries. It is obvious that when two states negotiate mutual peace agreements they explicitly -or implicitly- look for an end to the state of war between them, otherwise it won't be true that you make peace with your enemies. The daily crimes of the Israeli occupation army against the Palestinian civilians in West Bank and Gaza strip and the war against Lebanon in 2006 are just examples of that state of war. The UK however is not by any means at war with any of the Arab countries, including the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and hence Jewish British citizens who serve in the Israeli occupation army become theoretically guilty of an offence against the law.

I need not to say, but I will do, that it does not need me to be dictated by the British law to make me realise that it is a betrayal to my humanity to proudly serve in an army which evolved from Zionist terrorist groups which was responsible for hundreds of massacres against the Palestinians in 1948 and 1949 and for the displacement of half of the Palestinian nation from their homeland. It does not need laws to forbid an English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh (whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or atheist) from involving in the repair and maintenance of the Israeli army artillery which is directly responsible for the killing of thousands of Palestinians and for jeopardising the lives and well being of millions of Palestinians through its practices which include, but are not limited to, hundreds of checkpoints, invasions, curfews, imprisonment of more than 10,000 Palestinians (Men, women and children and quarter of the Palestinian Parliament), building the apartheid wall (including its 40-meter wide electrified fence and 8-meter high concrete wall parts), the ongoing construction of Israeli settlements among Palestinian communities in the Occupied West Bank and the continuous judaisation of the holy city of Jerusalem by demolishing Arab properties and replacing them with Jewish communities.

It is a shame that while only half of the Jewish Britons consider themselves as Zionists (based on a survey pubished by IJV), Zionists still insist to hijack every institution which is supposed to serve the followers of Judaism regardless of their political stances (including UJS and the Board of Deputies) and to silence every Jewish voice which speaks against Zionism or the Zionist regime and its racist and apartheid policies and practices. UJS is already in breach of this common-sense commitment by being a member of the Zionist Youth Council, an organisation which adopts Zionism as a basis for its agenda despite its racist and discriminatory nature and the fact that many Jews disagree with it. The schizophrenia of the UJS proves to be far worse than the most pessimistic could have feared. What else can we expect from a British "National" Union after it openly called its membership to break the law for the sake of another country? Probably officially launching a program to recruit Jewish youth to fight in the Israeli Occupation Army would be the next good idea?!

Until Politicians decide to wake up and shut the UJS unless it stops acting as an Israeli National Union, all universities and colleges in the UK should take a firm stand against the national Union's dual-nationalism by giving no platform to Jewish campus societies that affiliate with UJS "the ambassador of Israel".

Hadeel ... Now on PaLoRaMa

2007-05-05T00:38:00.000+01:00

the short film "Hadeel", the winner of the Jury's award in Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival for the category of Short films, is now available on PaLoRaMa (Hat tip to the Director Riyadh Shaheen and My friend Arwa).

Hadeel is about childhood and innocence, but it's also about the Zionist barbarism and the world's apathy.

Watch the film and read a news article about Hadeel

Another innocent child dies in Israeli bombardment of Gaza
By: Defence for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS)

At 5.30pm on Monday 10 April 2006, at least six artillery shells fired by the Israeli military fell on the family house of Mohammed Rabe'eya Ghaban in Beit Lahiya, in the north of the Gaza Strip. Shrapnel from the shells pierced the skull of Mohammed's eight-year old daughter Hadeel, killing her instantly. The shelling also resulted in the injury of eight other family members, including Hadeel's brothers and sisters:
Rawan Ghaban 1 and a half years old
Rana Ghaban 3 years old
Munir Ghaban 4 years old
Amneh Ghaban 9 years old
Ghassan Ghaban 11 years old
Bassam Ghaban 15 years old
Tahrir Ghaban 17 years old
The children's mother, 35-year old Sofia, was the eighth family member wounded in the attack.
Several neighbours were also injured including:
Jaqueline Mo'ein Maarouf 11 years old
Mariam Maher Al-‘Assi 15 years old
The killing of Hadeel and the wounding of her siblings and friends is the latest crime to come out of Israel's escalating aggression against the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. Despite the physical withdrawal of the Israeli military from the area in August 2005, Israeli occupation forces continue to exercise military control over the entire Strip – intensifying assassination attacks against Palestinian activists, shelling residential areas and imposing a virtual siege on the whole strip by sealing entry and exits points to goods and people.
Since the beginning of this year, 15 Palestinian children have been killed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including eight from the Gaza Strip. Four of the eight were passers by - killed in Israeli extra-judicial assassination attempts against Palestinian activists; two Gaza children were killed by gunfire; one by unexploded ordinance while Hadeel is the eighth Gaza child to die so far this year.
Defence for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS) views with grave concern this growing list of child fatalities and this latest Israeli crime. The recent Israeli military activities, including the bombing of residential areas, preventing food supplies from reaching the population and carrying out extra-judicial killings are considered war crimes under international law.
As such, DCI/PS calls on the international community to assume its moral responsibilities and legal obligations under international law and to act immediately and effectively to stop these gross violations being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians.

Game is over for Jerusalem ... Almost!

2007-05-03T20:00:00.000+01:00

I haven't posted on my blog for quite long time as I made the pledge not to touch it until I submit my PhD thesis. But I couldn't resist the email I received from my friend Diana about the judaization of the Holy City of Al-Quds (Jerusalem). As a member of the Coalition for Jerusalem, The Palestinian Counseling Center has been doing a great confronting the the Israeli plans to judaize the city. Their latest achievement is a complete English and Arabic unofficial translation of the proposed Israeli Master Plan for Jerusalem "Jerusalem 2000". In addition, they published a preliminary report on the implications of the plan on Occupied East Jerusalem (and in Arabic as well).

You can find the full translation here (and Arabic). Alternatively, you can go directly to the individual sections using the following links (Arabic links below)

Jerusalem Master Plan 2000

contents

Introduction

Policy Documents Definition and Goals

Open Space

The Old City

Residential Building

City Center and Employment

Urban Building Code

Population and Society

Economy

Higher Education

Preservation of Building Heritage

Archaeology

Public Services

Tourism

Transportation

Environmental Quality

Infrastructure

Planning Alternatives and Choice of preferred Alternative

المخطط الهيكلي الاسرائيلي 2000 لمدينة القدس

فهرس المحتويات

ملخص شامل

الفصل الأول – وثائق سياسات التخطيط – التعريف والأهداف

الفصل الثاني – المناطق المفتوحة

الفصل الثالث – البلدة القديمة

الفصل الرابع – السكن

الفصل الخامس – مركز المدينة والأعمال

الفصل السادس – هيكل بناء المدينة

الفصل السابع – السكان والمجتمع

الفصل الثامن – الاقتصاد

الفصل التاسع – التعليم العالي

الفصل العاشر – حفظ الميراث المعماري

الفصل الحادي عشر – الآثار

الفصل الثاني عشر – الخدمات العامة

الفصل الثالث عشر – السياحة

الفصل الرابع عشر - المواصلات

الفصل الخامس عشر – جودة البيئة

الفصل السادس عشر – البنى الهيكلية التحتية

الفصل السابع عشر - البدائل التخطيطية واختيار البديل الأفضل

So, do you think the game is over? Not Yet

What can you do?

SPREAD THE WORD (Email, Blog, Digg, Post) EDUCATE YOURSELF BOYCOTT

Fatima, A Traitor? (The Zionist Story Oscar)

2007-02-28T06:42:00.000Z

How many of you know that Palestine was there in this year’s Oscar? Probably not that many. And you know what, the musical short film “West Bank Story” won the best short film Oscar. The question that rises: is it any good? I’ll try to answer this.

I watched the film few minutes after it won the Oscar. Many critics said the film is hilarious and will make you laugh till tears. From a personal experience, I was about to throw up! If I am to give the director Ari Sandel the benefit of doubt I will consider him a naive who knows nothing about the Zionist regime and its crimes against the Palestinians. Otherwise I shall consider the director part of the Zionist propaganda to feed the world an upside-down version of what’s actually going on in Palestine.

The film is starred by Ben Denmark “David” and Noureen Dewulf “Fatima”. David, an Israeli soldier, and Fatima, a fast food cashier, fall in love “defying a 2000-year tradition of hatred and war between their families, Jews and Muslims”. Both Arabs and Jews are portrayed as experts in provoking each other with their weapons are Hummus and Kosher. The only wise and nice Jew in the film is the Israeli Soldier and at the other side it’s only Fatima who tries to make the effort to narrow the gap between the two families.

Mr. Sandel, if you have a little bit of rationality you will admit that occupation soldiers are never nice and wise. Israeli soldiers who serve the Zionist apartheid regime in its plot to cleanse the Palestinians never care for those they are killing and sabotaging their lives every day. Israeli soldiers do not raid Palestinian territories to enjoy helping the Palestinians. The only fun an Israeli soldier enjoys is to shoot or beat a Palestinian and watch him or her bleed till death. And to keep you updated with how nice the Israeli soldiers are with the Palestinians, here are some photos taken during the still-ongoing raid of the Israeli Occupation army on the Palestinian city of Nablus. As I’m writing these words I’m also listening to the news that the Israeli army are arresting the parents and wives of some “wanted” Palestinian heroes in the city. Very nice and humane, isn’t it?

Mr. Sandel, as your film title states, you were depicting two neighbourhoods in the Palestinian West Bank, Arab and Jewish, who need to live in peace and harmony side to side. You are very mistaken Ari. Israelis do not have the right to live in the West Bank or any other place in Palestine; only Jewish Palestinians do along with Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Even if 58 years have passed since the Israeli occupation of Palestine no one can deny the fact that this occupation is illegal, that Palestine belongs to and only to the Palestinian nation and that the only people who have the right to return to Palestine from the Diaspora are the Palestinian refugees not the Jews. With your claims you are neglecting tens of international conventions and resolutions which instate the Palestinians right to freedom, self-determination and return to their homeland, Palestine.

Mr. Sandel, the Palestinian problem is NOT with the Jews, but with the Zionists who pretend to speak in the name of the Jews when in fact they only speak in the name of the Devil and act on his behalf (probably worse). Palestinians (Muslims, Christians and Jews) have been living as one united nation for centuries and they still do. In the 1920s the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, personally went to king Abdullah of Trans-Jordan to declare the Jewish communities’ loyalty, and in order to elucidate the true Jewish stance, which was in total opposition to the Zionist movement. In 1947, The then-chief rabbi, Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, sent a letter to the United Nations in Lake Placid, stating “I have under me 60,000 constituents, we do not want to be included in this state of Israel that you are creating..” Unfortunately, they where totally ignored.

Mr. Sandel, Muslims do NOT have a problem with the Jews. History tells you that the Jews lived their best era under Islamic governance in Arabia, North Africa and Europe. Muslims don’t hate Jews Ari. Muslims care for their Palestinian brothers and sisters, no matter what religion they follow, because it doesn’t need a religion to dictate you common sense. When I take your bag the only justice is to return your bag to you, and you are the victim and I am the guilty until I do so. This is common sense Mr. Sandel. It’s not only Muslims who care; The vast majority of Christians do know the truth and support the Palestinian cause. Don’t get fooled with your government’s policy which supports Israel along the way. Your president and government are a bunch of Zionists who have the full support of the extremely strong Zionist lobby which also occupies the people of the United States with its powerful media machine. Yet people who seek the truth will always find a way to reach it even when the Zionist media tried day and night to brainwash them. If you really long for peace in the Middle East you need to be among those who seek the truth, unveil it and stand against the racist criminal ideology of Zionism and its advocates.

Mr. Sandel, I have to congratulate you for your exceptional imagination. A Palestinian woman falling in love with a Zionist Israeli soldier; that’s only in your dreams! No Palestinian woman will ever betray her people or cause and sell her honour and heart to someone whose duty is to kill her, her parents, brothers, sisters, children, neighbours, friends, classmates and colleagues. If a woman does then she doesn’t deserve to be Palestinian any more. What makes someone a Palestinian is the love for his homeland, Palestine, and his nation, the Palestinians.

Winning the Oscar doesn’t change facts Mr. Sandel. We the Palestinians will keep fighting with all means for our just and righteous cause, and one day –hopefully very soon- PALESTINE WILL BE FREE, FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA.

Sands of Sorrow (1950)

2007-02-13T19:30:00.000Z

The commentator was shocked by how the Palestinian refugees could stay in miserable refugee camps for two full years. It's been more than 58 years now and nothing has really changed and no one has answered his plea... What an apathetic world!

I won't add a single word, for a picture speaks a thousand words.

More refugee-related films are coming to PaLoRaMa very soon.

Please spread the word

the world needs to see the truth of the beginnings

If you want to add the film to your site you can use the following code:

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In the future you can find this film and many others in PaLoRaMa

"We Killed Jesus, and We're Proud of it !"

2007-02-07T21:51:00.000Z

The so called "Jewish" settlers in Hebron keep surprising us with their ability to prove continuously how someone in the shape of a human being can act worse than an animal; excuse me animals! I'm sorry that I have no choice but to call them "Jewish" as this is what they claim to be and I can't call them Israelis as they don't live in the so called "Israel" but rather in the West Bank, a land internationally recognised as an Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Tel Rumeida is a small Palestinian neighbourhood deep in the West Bank city of Hebron. Palestinian families, from whom these settlers occupied lands, live directly next to these settlers and are often virtual prisoners in their homes, subject to the settlers' violent attacks and destruction of property.

The footage below shows a "Jewish" settler in Tel Rumeida cursing and threatening a British volunteer among many internationals who left their homes and families and moved to Palestine to work in the neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida, Hebron, keeping a presence on the streets to prevent against settler attacks and soldier/police harassment of the Palestinian residents who live in the neighbourhood. The title above is just one of that settler’s sick quotations recorded in the footage.

The Zionist state of "Israel" still insists to implant such scum in the Arab Palestinian city of Hebron in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. I call upon our brothers, the true followers of the divine religion of Judaism and all those who care for the Jewish faith and its reputation and purity to publicly distance themselves from and disown those uncivilised creatures whose acts help in nothing but to distort the image of the Jewish faith, and to extend that to include all the zionists who believe in the racist myth that God gave them the right to expel the Palestinians from their homeland and take it over.

And as a Palestinian, I would like to salute the heroes from all over the world who are sacrificing their lives, luxuries, hopes, and dreams to save the Palestinians in their struggle for freedom sending a bold message “Shame On You” to their own governments, specially the American and European governments who are empowering "Israel" and imposing a total blockade on the Palestinians.

As we are in it, I would like to draw the attention to the new trend in Europe and specially here in the UK to endorse a new definition for Anti-Semitism that was suggested by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). The definition considers "Israel" part of the Jewish identity and hence equates Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism. I respect Judaism as a faith and that's why I reject the Zionist agenda to politicise this divine faith linking it with the terrorist state of "Israel". Furthermore, We should all reject such a definition which would gag us and disallow us from questioning the right of the illegal zionist state to exist in Palestine.

One interesting part of the definition reads as follows:

"Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:
...
- Using the symbols and images associated with classical anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis."

From my personal experience I never heard anyone openly accusing the Jews of killing Jesus (well in fact for me as a Muslim I don't even believe that Jesus was killed). The only two examples I recall in my whole life for using this claim in any context were of "Jewish" settlers in Hebron who were stating proudly that they killed Jesus; One of which is shown below. The other one occurred last year when "Jewish" settlers attacked the internationals and almost killed a Belgian volunteer again in poor Hebron... Strange enough!

Now I’ll leave you with the disgusting footage WARNING: The film contains bad language (In fact the worst!)

Here is one more footage setting new higher limits for barbarism

(If you can't see the video controls right-click on the video and click on "Play/Pause")

For more footages and information about Tel Rumeida volunteers, please visit their website: http://www.telrumeidaproject.org

You can also find some of the settlers footages on my own library PaLoRaMa

Remembering Genocide

2007-01-27T01:33:00.000Z

On the Holocaust Memorial Day

27th January 2007

I'm a Palestinian; I'm also a Human, and thus I care for people like me, whether Muslims, Christians, Jews, followers of other religions, or atheists.

I'm a Palestinian; I can be a Muslim Palestinian, a Christian Palestinian, a Jewish Palestinian, or an atheist Palestinian.

I don't hate the Jews, simply because they are humans like me. Yet I oppose Zionists because they stole or supported the theft of my homeland. And my ultimate aim will remian the freedom of my land, Palestine, and my people, the Palestinians.

I don't deny the Holocaust that was committed seven decades ago by the Nazis and their collaborators and in which many Gypsies, Poles (Catholic/Christian, and Jewish), Serbs, Soviet military prisoners of war, civilians on occupied territories including Russians and other East Slavs, mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, Eastern Christians, and Catholic and Protestant clergy were persecuted and killed. I totally condemn this crime and I'm disgusted by its savagery and severity. For me a crime is a crime whether ten or ten million innocent people were killed.

I do condemn the 1930s' Holocaust, but I also condemn, even more, the apathy and the silence of the whole world on the 58-year-old still ongoing Holocaust committed against the Palestinians by the Zionists in the name of the victims of the first Holocaust. It is the support and approval -even by silence- to this current Holocaust that should be considered illegal and it is today’s Genocide that is now more demanding to be remembered and stopped immediately.

I condemn the 1930s’ Holocaust, but I also condemn the cheap exploitation of that horrific crime to justify the displacement of the Palestinian nation, the occupation of their homeland, and the continuous killing of innocent Palestinians. Likewise, I denounce the cheap use of the 11^th of September’s massacre and its innocent victims to justify the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of other innocent victims. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; this is what the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, and unfortunately this is what we first forget when we deal with each other’s conflicts and disputes. There are no chosen people for God; we are all equal, and those who fulfil their duties as humans are the ones who deserve their humanity the most.

Finally, this year Bolton Council decided to replace the Holocaust Memorial Day with a more inclusive Genocide Memorial Day which will include among its activities both the Nazi Holocaust and the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians by Israelis. I strongly encourage you to campaign for a similar action in your own locality. Remembering the cruelty of the past must be enough of a motivation to make us work hard to stop today’s cruelty from taking more innocent lives around the world.

PALORAMA

2007-01-15T23:53:00.000Z

Palestine Film Collection

Palestine Through The Camera Lens

This is a humble effort to start a library of all film material on Palestine that are available online. There are some documentaries, movies and video footages. I would encourage everyone to buy their personal copies of the films from www.arabfilm.com or www.palestineonlinestore.com as they are really precious assets to keep at home and show to your family, friends and in local community events.

This library needs your help. If you know any film on Palestine that is available online please let me know about it by adding its link and information at the comments section.

Happy watching!

Latest:

Hadeel (NEW)

Documentaries:

Palestine is still the issue

Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land

The Iron Wall

Arna's Children

My Dear Olive Tree

Jenin Jenin

The Agony... Deir Yassin

Deir Yassin Remembered

The Nakba Archive

This Body is a Prison

The Killing Zone

Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

Rachel... An American Conscience

Frontiers of Dreams and Fears

People and The Land

We Dare to Speak: Jews Against Zionist Genocide in Palestine

Captured Prisoners: the Whole Story

Israel’s Secret Weapon

Zionist War Crimes

Movies:

Paradise Now

Video Footages on Zionist savagery against Palestinian civilians:

Settler Riot in Tel Rumeida

Settler Children in Tel Rumeida

Settler Women in Tel Rumeida

Soldiers Swim in Drinking Water

Hebron Settlers Assault International Activists

Palestinians Harassed by Jewish Settler in Hebron Cage (Part 1)

Palestinians Harassed by Jewish Settler in Hebron Cage (Part 2)

Tobias - Life in Palestine Real Footage

Shebab Daiya - Life in the Promised Land

Important Notice

The owner of this blog is not responsible for the content of the posted films and doesn't claim to have watched all of them. If you believe any of the films posted or parts of them are offensive to any race or faith please post a comment in the comments section or email me at akram.awad(at)gmail.com and I will take action accordingly

Hadeel

Palestine is still the issue

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land

The Agony.. Deir Yassin

Deir Yassin Remembered

The Nakba Archive

This Body is a Prison

The Killing Zone

Palestinian Refugees in Iraq

Rachel Corrie... An American Conscience

Frontiers of Dreams and Fears

People and The Land

We Dare to Speak

Captured Prisoners: the Whole Story

Israel’s Secret Weapon

Zionist War Crimes

Paradise Now

Settler Riot in Tel Rumeida

Settler Children in Tel Rumeida

Settler Women in Tel Rumeida

Soldiers Swim in Drinking Water

Hebron Settlers Assault International Activists

Palestinians Harassed by Jewish Settler in Hebron Cage (Part 1)

Palestinians Harassed by Jewish Settler in Hebron Cage (Part 2)

Tobias - Life in Palestine Real Footage

Shebab Daiya - Life in the Promised Land

The Real Antisemitism

2007-01-13T01:52:00.000Z

Here we are with another very good reason to boycott all Israeli educational and academic institutions, simply because an educational system that is based on the racist Zionist ideology shall beget such a racist generation who will feed their sick mentality to their children. Hence if we are sincere in our fight against racism we shall stand firm against Israel and its racist educational curriculum.

On the other hand, it is really impressive to see that the Palestinians haven't lost their humanity even with their enemy who stole their homeland in 1948 and have been killing and torturing them even before then. It just reveals which nation truly aspires to peace.

If there is one identified group that should be labeled Antisemites it is the Zionists who are full of hatred toward the largest group of Semites, Arabs.

Youth believe Arabs dirty, uneducated

By Ahiya Raved, Yediot Aharanot

Recent poll reveals 75 percent of Jewish students believe Arabs uneducated, uncivilized, unclean. Similar stereotypes found amongst Arab students toward Jews, but in lower percentages.
A Haifa University survey investigating Arabs and Jews' views on one another reveals disturbing results.
The poll showed that 75 percent of Jewish students believe that Arabs are uneducated people, are uncivilized and are unclean.
On the other hand 25 percent of the Arab youth believe that Jews are the uneducated ones, while 57 percent of the Arab's believe Jews are unclean.
Over a third of the Jewish students taking part in the survey confirmed that they are afraid of Arabs.
The poll was conducted by Dr. Haggai Kupermintz, Dr. Yigal Rosen and Harbi Hasaisi of Haifa University's Center for Research on Peace Education.
The data was presented at a bi-lingual conference held in Haifa. The study, titled "Perception of 'the Other' amongst Jewish and Arab Youth in Israel" included 1,600 students studying in 22 high schools around the country.
"We have found a serious expression of stereotypical thinking on the Jewish students' part regarding the Arab youth," said Dr. Kupermintz, who pointed out that 69 percent of the Jewish students think that Arabs are not smart.
Willingness to meet with Jewish students
"These students come in with firm stereotypical baggage regarding the other, and in this case, this is the Arabs," said Kupermintz.
According to the survey, the Arab youth views the Jewish society with fewer reservations: 27 percent of the Arab students believe Jews are uneducated, while 40 percent say they are uncivilized, and 47 percent believe they are not smart.
"We were not surprised with the outcome of the research," Kupermintz told Ynet.
"Anyone who is familiar with the field knows that these warped perceptions exist, but these findings are at the most severe extreme of a disturbing phenomenon. Also, up until now, I don’t think such a high level amongst the Jewish students' population – over a third – who admit that are afraid of Arabs, has ever been recorded." Kupermintz further stated that the survey was conducted in October 2004, and that if it was to be held today, he believes the results would be much more extreme.
He also added that, contrary to stereotypes, the Arab public in Israel shows more willingness of integration in the Jewish sector, than Jews do in the Arab sector.
Data from the survey also showed that 75 percent of Jewish students feel Arabs are violent, as opposed to 64 percent of Arab students.
Over 50 percent of Arab students showed understanding towards the feelings of the Jewish students.
75 percent of Arab students showed willingness to meet with Jewish students as opposed to less than 50 percent willingness amongst Jewish students.

Carter Centre's Voluntary Cleanup

2007-01-12T00:53:00.000Z

Carter Center advisers resign over book

POSTED: 2:19 p.m. EST, January 11, 2007
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Former President Jimmy Carter's controversial book and subsequent remarks about the Israel-Palestinian conflict have prompted the resignations of 14 people from an advisory board of the Carter Center, the 25-year-old Atlanta-based humanitarian organization.
The 14 explained their concerns, which reflect an uproar in the U.S. Jewish community over Carter's Mideast stance, in separate letters sent Thursday to fellow Board of Councilors members and Carter.
"We can no longer endorse your strident and uncompromising position," the letter to Carter said. "This is not the Carter Center or the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support."
The letter to the fellow Board of Councilors, with more than 200 members, was brief and less detailed but expressed concern about Carter's book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid."
"We are deeply troubled by the president's comments and writings and are submitting the following letter of resignation to the Carter Center," the letter said.
The letters were signed by Alan Abrams, Steve Berman, Michael Coles, Jon Golden, Doug Hertz, Barbara Babbit Kaufman, Liane Levetan, Jeff Levy, Leon Novak, Ambassador William B. Schwartz Jr., William B. Schwartz III, Steve Selig, Cathey Steinberg, and Gail Solomon.
The letter to Carter said while each person "has been proud to be associated" with the center and its work, "we can no longer in good conscience continue to serve the center as members of the Board of Councilors."
The Board of Councilors is separate from the center's board of trustees, which is its governing body, the center says.
The Board of Councilors "is an advisory body of community leaders and business people who are briefed quarterly on the center's work and serve as emissaries of the center to the greater community," the center said. "They are not engaged in implementing work of the center and are not a governing board."
The letter to Carter accused him of abandoning his "historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side." Carter's book confused "opinion with fact, subjectivity with objectivity and force for change with partisan advocacy," the letter said.
"Israelis, through deed and public comment, have consistently spoken of a desire to live in peace and make territorial compromise to achieve this status. The Palestinian side has consistently resorted to acts of terror as a national expression and elected parties endorsing the use of terror, the rejection of territorial compromise and of Israel's right to exist. Palestinian leaders have had chances since 1947 to have their own state, including during your own presidency when they snubbed your efforts."
The center's initial response to the departures expressed appreciation for the members' efforts but did not address the concerns.
"We are grateful to these Board of Councilors members for their years of service and support for The Carter Center in advancing peace and health around the world," the center said.
Many Jewish groups say it is unfair to equate Israel or its policies in occupied territories with the old South African apartheid system that divided the races.
Carter has said the term refers to Israeli policies in occupied territories, not to Israel itself.
The former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner has been busy speaking out on the issue since the book was published.
Brandeis University in Massachusetts -- a nonsectarian school with a Jewish heritage and a large Jewish student body -- said Thursday that Carter will speak there and take questions.
The school said he "has accepted an invitation from a student and faculty committee" there "to speak on campus, perhaps as soon as January 23, although the date may be subject to change."

Carter: Israeli Apartheid Worse than South African

2007-01-03T02:17:00.000Z

Last Word: Jimmy Carter

Revisiting 'Apartheid'

Newsweek International
Dec. 25, 2006 - Jan. 1, 2007 issue - Former president Jimmy Carter has long been regard-ed as an elder statesman, using his political muscle to address issues like democracy and human rights. But he's also been a prolific author. Since leaving office in January 1981, he has written 23 books, on subjects ranging from American moral values to his childhood on a Georgia farm. His latest—and perhaps most controversial—offering, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," reflects his long interest in the Middle East. (As president, he personally negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt.) But it has also drawn fire for its use of the word apartheid to describe the current circumstances of the Palestinian people. While the book has shot up the best-seller list, the former president has been denounced for his criticism of Israel. He's also come under fire from former Carter Center associate Kenneth Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University, who has raised questions about the book's accuracy. (Disclosure: NEWSWEEK's Christopher Dickey was one of the people asked to comment on an early draft of the book.) President Carter spoke to NEWSWEEK's Eleanor Clift. Excerpts:
Clift: You've created quite a stir. I suspect it was partly intentional.
Carter: Well, it was. One of the purposes of the book was to provoke discussion, which is very rarely heard in this country, and to open up some possibility that we could rejuvenate or restart the peace talks in Israel that have been absent for six years—so that was the purpose of the book.
The word apartheid—did you agonize about that?
Not really, I didn't agonize because I knew that's an accurate description of what's going on in Palestine. I would say that the plight of the Palestinians now—the confiscation of their land, that they're being suppressed completely against voicing their disapproval of what's happening, the building of the wall that intrudes deep within their territory, the complete separation of Israelis from the Palestinians—all of those things in many ways are worse than some of the aspects of apartheid in South Africa. There is no doubt about it, and no one can go there and visit the different cities in Palestine without agreeing with what I have said.
Why do you think you're under attack for the book and the title?
You and I both know the powerful influence of AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], which is not designed to promote peace. I'm not criticizing them, they have a perfect right to lobby, but their purpose in life is to protect and defend the policies of the Israeli government and to make sure those policies are approved in the United States and in our Congress—and they're very effective at it. I have known a large number of Jewish organizations in this country [that] have expressed their approval for the book and are trying to promote peace. But their voices are divided and they're relatively reluctant to speak out publicly. And any member of Congress who's looking to be re-elected couldn't possibly say that they would take a balanced position between Israel and the Palestinians, or that they would insist on Israel withdrawing to international borders, or that they would dedicate themselves to protect human rights of Palestinians—it's very likely that they would not be re-elected.
In some of your interviews you've said that this is a debate that's out in the open in Israel, and it's only here that we feel inhibited.
Oh yes—that's correct. Not only in Israel—all over Israel, the major news media, every day—[but] obviously in the Arab world, even in Europe. In this country, any sort of debate back and forth, any sort of incisive editorial comment in the major newspapers, is almost completely absent.
You're obviously aware of your main critic, Mr. Stein, who used to be with the Carter Center.
Thirteen years ago! He hasn't been associated with the Carter Center for 13 years.
He says that he was a third party in some meetings and that his notes don't jibe with yours.
He was a third party in some of the meetings, I can't deny that. And a lot of those meetings took place when I was still president and an exact transcription was kept and it's in the official files. So the reports that I gave in the book are completely accurate.
He also accuses you of plagiarism, saying you took from other sources.
The only source that I took anything from that I know about was my own book, which I wrote earlier—it's called "The Blood of Abraham" ... Somebody told me [that Stein] was complaining about the maps in the book. Well, the maps are derived from an atlas that was published in 2004 in Jerusalem and it was basically produced under the aegis of officials in Sweden. And the Swedish former prime minister is the one who told me this was the best atlas available about the Middle East.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16240761/site/newsweek/

Talking about apartheid, I remember few months ago when we erected the mock Apartheid wall here in Leeds a Jewish student approached me and shouted "This is disgusting!" I replied "It is indeed." He got mad when he sensed sarcasm in my reply (I was serious though. I was referring to the original wall not the mock one!) He said "I am a Jewish student and I feel offended by calling the fence Israel is building an apartheid wall" !!!! One think I have to admit, when Zionists get bankrupt of any worthy arguments they become really funny and they make your day after a day full of hard work!

Zionists blackmail "University of Freedom"

2006-12-15T05:09:00.000Z

Gagging of Leeds students ‘in breach of law’

15/12/2006

By Nathan Jeffay

The Jewish Chronicle

The University union authorities in Leeds have been warned that they will be breaking the law if they apply the controversial new policy of gagging Jewish students.

As the JC reported last week, the student union has been mandated to ignore Jewish Society complaints “as long as Judaism as a faith is not offended.” Jewish students — who number 1,000 in Leeds — were outraged, saying the move gives the growing pro-Palestine lobby, which proposed the motion, carte blanche to libel Israel.

This week, the Union of Jewish Students decreed that “the motion is in contravention of the 1994 Education Act.” According to campaigns director Mitch Simmons, it appears to offend the requirement outlined in section 22, dealing with student unions, that “there should be a complaints procedure available to all students or groups of students who... are dissatisfied in their dealings with the union.”

Damola Timeyin, communications and democracy officer for the Leeds union, refused to comment on the legal question. However, in a letter to the JC, he insisted: “The motion in no way changes Jewish students’ right to support the State of Israel or debate the issue.”

Mr Simmons said that UJS was not currently planning legal action, as it expected the union to drop the policy given its “clear” legal difficulties. “The point of this law is that any group has the right to complain,” he said. “You cannot say that this motion, however well it was passed by student democracy, is able to overturn that right.”

However, a J-Soc campaign officer, Hannah Zatman, said it was “consulting lawyers, and is determined to fight this policy with as much strength as possible.”

Chaplain Rabbi Michael Treblow met pro-vice chancellor Professor Stephen Scott at the start of the week “to convey that this is an issue of great concern to Jewish students and to British Jewry as a whole, and also to make it clear that the reality of Jewish identity in the UK is that it is intertwined with the existence of the State of Israel.”

He voiced alarm that the sole definition of Jewish identity in the student union was religious, on the say-so of the Palestinian Solidarity Group, authors of the policy. This meant that Jewish students were effectively powerless to complain against any anti-Israel activities in the union.
He also discussed fears that the J-Soc might be banned as a consequence of the policy. With Israel’s legitimacy as part of Jewish identity challenged, the PSG was free to claim that the J-Soc was not advocating Jewish identity but a political ideology that, in the motion, was equated with racism. The J-Soc could then find itself excluded from the union under its “no platform” for racists policy.

But despite the chaplain’s arguments, vice-chancellor Professor Michael Arthur wrote to the JC this week insisting: “The referendum decision… does not conflict with the university’s values.” He claimed that an acceptable status quo existed, whereby “people may criticise the policies and actions of the State of Israel on our campus. But they may not be antisemitic.”

On hearing of Professor Arthur’s position, Rabbi Treblow was “not happy,” considering it a “simple defence,” rather than addressing student concerns. Ms Zatman criticised the university, arguing: “It has possibly not looked at the policy, which is a direct attack on the Jewish Society. It should be more concerned with the Jewish Society not being allowed the rights of other societies — clearly a matter of discrimination.”

Akram Awad, the Palestinian Solidarity Group activist who introduced the policy, posted a jubilant blog entry dedicated to “Leeds University’s Zionist J-Soc, to the Zionist UJS, and to all advocates of the racist illegal Zionist regime called ‘Israel.’”

He wrote: “Nothing on earth would stop us from fighting for the justice and freedom… for all victims of the evil Zionist virus anywhere in the world. If you think that Leeds motions are our biggest victory you are very mistaken; this victory is so little for us and we haven’t even started yet. If you decide to keep defending and advocating the Devil then don’t blame us for [J-Soc] being offended every time we expose your beloved Zionists’ crimes, because ‘Israel’ itself is the biggest offence to humanity.”

From the motion
This Union notes: That although the LUU Jewish Society (J-Soc) is categorised by the Student Union as a religious society, a principal role for JSoc is to promote the state of Israel via its activities and affiliation with the National Union of Jewish Students…
This Union resolves: To formally advise the LUU Jewish Society that promoting and defending Israel in its activities indicate that J-Soc is taking and advocating a curtain [sic] political stand in behalf of the Jewish students on campus…

End of JC article

I salute the University of Leeds' Vice-Chancellor Prof. Michael Arthur and the Student Union's Communications and Democracy Officer Damola Timeyin for their strong righteous stand in support of freedom of speech and healthy debate for everyone on campus INCLUDING THE JEWISH STUDENTS.

Zionist J-Soc ... Bad Losers!

2006-12-09T23:43:00.000Z

Jewish students gagged at Leeds

08/12/2006 15:21:00

By Nathan Jeffay
The Jewish Chronicle Newspaper

Britain's largest Jewish student community was in a state of shock this week after being constitutionally gagged against a background of intensifying anti-Israel campaigns and propaganda. The student union at the University of Leeds has recently become the stronghold of a growing pro-Palestine lobby, which regularly runs campaigns declaring Israel to be a racist and apartheid state. Following a campus-wide referendum last Friday, union authorities have been mandated to ignore J-Soc complaints "as long as Judaism as a faith is not offended." This policy was carried by 1,421 votes to 895. The motion, proposed by members of the Palestinian Solidarity Group, catalogues J-Soc complaints against it. It then claims that the existing practice of "considering every complaint received by the student union as a real complaint" constituted "an arbitrary use of authority." A further successful motion, worded as a polemic against Israel, resolves to twin the union with the student body at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, where many seats on the student council are held by the Hamas-linked Islamic List. It brings to a climax a disturbing term for Jewish students - in the last month alone, UK J-Socs have fought against some 11 motions, the majority of which they managed to defeat. Campus leaders, students and academics have voiced concern that the first motion singles out the university's Jewish students - thought to number almost 1,000 - and strips them of basic rights enjoyed by all others. They fear this principle will be introduced in other unions, creating a culture where Israeli's critics have carte blanche to launch tirades regardless of their truth, and where it becomes taboo for any J-Soc to show solidarity with Israel. They have also reacted with incredulity to the motion's wording, in which its Palestinian Solidarity Group authors claim for themselves - and to the exclusion of Jewish students - authority to define Jewish identity. Now the motion has passed, Jewish identity is now exclusively religious, according to the union's constitution. After the votes, the atmosphere at Hillel House was gloomy. "The motion is trying to tell us what we should and should not think about Judaism," said Mark Frazer, 21. "Its proponents are saying that Israel should not be part of our Jewish identity; we think is. It should be for us to decide." Judith Keen, 20, spoke of "feeling let down as the referendum process is meant to help students here, not be used a political tool." Zach Esdaile, one of the J-Soc's campaign officers, claimed it will "add to fear on campus." He said: "This motion is supposedly about freedom of speech [by preventing complaints], but it delivers anything but that." However Damola Timeyin, communications and democracy officer for the union, said that the motion was passed by a democratic forum, and as such is binding. According to Mitch Simmons, campaigns director at UJS, the motion represents the "stepping up" of a "national, systematic and coordinated attempt on campuses" to blacken Israel's reputation and delegitimise Israel's centrality in Jewish identity. Insiders in the National Union of Students report a growing rift with Leeds over the motion, even though, publicly, NUS respects the autonomy of member unions. NUS president Gemma Tumelty would not "comment extensively," but confirmed there is a clash.

Here is a competition for all of you; count as many lies as you can in the report. The winner gets a very exceptional reward: ZIONISTS WILL HATE YOU!

Blackening Israel's reputation?! Oh yeah, The Worst Country in the World, what a reputation we should work hard to spoil!

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

Source: Jerusalem Post
It could take Israel 30 years to change its brand image, after it placed last in a study of 36 countries, one of the leaders in the field of nation branding warned Saturday. Simon Anholt spoke with The Jerusalem Post on the heels of a recent survey he released in which 25,000 consumers were asked to rank 36 countries on issues of tourism, exports, governance, investment, immigration, cultural heritage and people. According to the study, known as the Nation Brands Index, which has been published four times a year since 2005, "Israel's brand is, by a considerable margin, the most negative we have ever measured in the NBI, and comes in at the bottom of the ranking on almost every question." Israel is not typically included in the survey, which looks at such as places as the US, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, China and Singapore. Britain came in first in the survey and the US was ninth. It was included in the third quarter survey of 2006 because there is a guest slot in each survey. "Only Bhutan, the first guest country we included in the NBI, achieved a similarly low score," said the study. But in the case of Bhutan the study attributed its poor score to the fact that few people had heard of it, according to the study. "Israel's poor scores are clearly not the result of anonymity; it is one of the most known countries in the world," said the study. The Foreign Ministry's Director of Public Affairs Amir Gissin said the survey underscored for him the importance of the new nation-branding drive Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni launched this fall. "We see Anholt's research as an opportunity to increase the awareness of decision makers in Israel to the image problem that Israel has in order to make us more determined to deal with the image problem," Gissin told the Post. As part of that drive, the ministry is looking for ways to focus international public attention away from the country's conflicts with the Palestinians and Hizbullah in favor of more positive images such as the country's technical innovations as well as musical, cultural and historical attractions. But Anholt warned on Saturday that the Foreign Ministry would have to be very patient before it benefits from its labors. While his 30-year prediction is not set in stone, Anholt said, he warned that changing people's attitudes and prejudice was so difficult and time-consuming that it often took decades. It took Japan and Ireland 30 years to change their public image, Anholt added. "There are no quick fixes to this," said Anholt, who added that he hoped the Israelis "are very patient." It was for this reason that he did not believe his study was significantly impacted by the fact that it was conducted during the war with Hizbullah in Lebanon over the summer. Israel was often in a state of conflict, Anholt said. It had been his experience, he said, that the survey measured long-seated opinions that were not greatly swayed by current events. Still, he said, just to be certain he planned to include Israel for a second time in the survey during a quiet period, "just to ascertain that the results were not skewed." Anholt said that his study differed from that of other surveys, in that this was not a politically-based public opinion poll. It did not measure people's ideas about the conflict with the Palestinians or Hizbullah, but rather it examined people's instinctive associations with the country that would impact their decisions outside the political arena, such as whether they would buy a product from Israel, visit the country, or hire an Israeli.

Finally this is a message to all advocates of the racist illegal Zionist regime called "Israel", nothing on earth would stop us from fighting for the Justice and freedom of the Palestinian nation (in Palestine and in Diaspora) from the evil Zionist virus "Israel". If you think that Leeds motions are our biggest victory you are very mistaken; this victory is so little for us and we haven't even started yet. We will keeping speaking out the truth and educating people about our cause no matter how much it costs us. If you decide to keep defending and advocating the Zionist state then don't blame us for being offended every time we expose your beloved Zionists' crimes, because "Israel" itself is the biggest offence to humanity.

Mission Accomplished!

2006-12-04T15:14:00.000Z

Dear All,

I have great news for you: WE DID IT! Both Leeds University Union Referendum motions for Palestine have passed and become binding policies to the Union Council as of now. Here are the results:

Motion 2 (Palestinian Students Right to Education): Won by 1433 votes to 1020.
Motion 5 (LUU Policy towards PSG and other Politically Active Societies): Won by 1421 votes to 895.

Motion 2 (now a policy) will be implemented by twinning with Birzeit University in Palestine, as well as helping to found a scholarship scheme for Palestinian students who wish to study at the University of Leeds. The new policy also obliges the Student Union and its Council to take a positive stand in supporting the right to education for Palestinian students whenever the issue is discussed nationally.

Motion 5 (also a policy now) ensures that the Palestinian Solidarity Group (PSG) and all other societies can now work freely in campaigning on campus and educating the University community on the Palestinian cause and Israeli crimes without fear of being stopped or discriminated against by the Union following nonsensical and frivolous complaints by Zionist students.

Let me reiterate: it wasn't the PSG committee who achieved this victory, WE DID IT ALL TOGETHER! Yes, it was the fact that we all (PSG, ISoc, Respect, Socialist Workers, Stop the War, PSC, Saudi Society, Omani Society, and many others) worked in unity, shoulder to shoulder, which made this a reality. This is proof that when we join hands together no one can stop us from achieving our noble aims.

Let us not underestimate this victory; we shouldn't forget that we were all challenged by a fierce opposition campaign from the Jewish Society (JSoc), probably the most powerful and extremely Zionist Jewish society in the UK, yet we all managed to overcome all obstacles, which include the many lies that made up the JSoc's campaign with the aim of confusing and misleading students. Our achievement wasn't granted as a result of a weak opposition - it was won through our sincerity, determination, unity and hard work.

The Referendum door is now closed, but a new door has just opened and should remain open; it is our belief and intention to continue our great work and to keep working together not only for Palestine but for all the ethical humanitarian and political causes around the world.

I would like to finish with a massive THANK YOU to all those who worked for this success; to those who wished to help but couldn't; and to all those who prayed for our victory: thank you all very much!

I'll leave you now with the Victory moment captured on video! Believe me, we are not mad, we were just excited!

For Students at Leeds Uni (2)

2006-11-27T23:39:00.000Z

Click on the image for more information

For Students at Leeds Uni

2006-11-27T23:36:00.000Z

Click on the image for more information

Palestinian Fighting for Freedom ... In Britain!

2006-11-19T20:36:00.000Z

Hello everybody!

It's been quite long time since the last time I posted an original article in my blog. The reason is that once the academic year starts I get a very long list of events, duties and politics to take care of. On the 2nd of November the Palestinian Solidarity Group (PSG) had a stall in the University commemorating the shameful Balfour Declaration in 1917 which promised to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine. We hanged a big banner behind the stall. As always, the Jewish Society (JSoc) members surrounded the stall trying to hinder the event and block other students from approaching the stall and learning about the Balfour Declaration and the true history of Palestine. They complained to to the Student Union Executive that they felt offended by the banner and they wanted the banner to be brought down! Here is the banner; it's offensive, isn't it?

I had, with two other members of PSG, to waste about an hour negotiating with the Student Union executives instead of being outside educating people about Palestine. I refuse to speak to Zionists as long as they keep advocating and defending the butcher and making lies about all aspects of the occupation, so I was always directing my speech to the Executive and she had to ask the Zionists on my behalf. At the end we agreed to make the compromise of removing the word "Jews" from "Zionist Jews" on the banner and replace it with "Zionists". The moment I went outside to cover the word "Jews" I found one of JSoc members who attended the negotiations shouting outside and complaining that we were delaying the covering of the word in purpose although I was actually waiting the Union to provide me with an orange marker to fit with the colours of the printed text. Then he started complaining that one sheet of paper wasn't enough to hide the word and he wanted to cover it with more sheets (how finicky!) I told him "Don't even dream I'm going to listen to you. This is what I agreed on with the Union. If you don't like it go and complain to the Union again!"

This is what the Student's newspaper wrote about it

Oh by the way, I used the same banner many times since last year and they never complained about it because they always found something else to make fuss about. They do it every time to hinder our events and stop us from exposing the Zionist crimes. They complain only for the sake of complaining and they never made a sensible complain. They just start shouting "Offensive, Offensive" about anything. I'm sure if I stand by myself behind an empty stall they will still consider me offensive!

Students and members of staff wrote words of support on our symbolic refugee tent

A narrator of the story of Palestine from 1800s up to date

And the banner with the word "Jews" veiled!

The problem isn't only with JSoc, but rather with the University administration who show a clear bias to Zionism and Zionist students. Even if the student union executives try to be reasonable in handling Zionists' complaints, they still get pressured by the University Secretary (Head of University). Roger Gair, the University Secretary, proved day after day that he is extremely pro-Zionist -if not Zionist himself-.

A couple of years ago my friend and I built a mock wall symbolising the Apartheid Wall being built by the Zionist state in the West Bank in Palestine. The first time it was erected on campus the University security forced PSG members to move the wall outside the campus and in few minutes a police force arrived to the scene and ordered the removal of the wall from the street. Last year we were stubborn enough to erect the wall regardless the fact that JSoc members caused a real chaos and got all the student union executives to come down and try to convince us to remove the wall (by the way the Balfour declaration banner was there and no one uttered a single word about it). None of the executives had a valid point in their argument because they themselves didn't believe in what they were doing but rather had no other option but to satisfy the Zionist Jewish Society. We made them utterly speechless because there was nothing offensive or insulting on the wall. The whole story was that Zionists wanted to continue building the Wall quietly and didn't want the rest of the world to know about the most brutal apartheid regime on earth; The mock wall doesn't help that agenda at all. When JSoc didn't find any legal way to stop us from using the wall in our event, they escalated the issue to their saviour, the University Secretary. After weeks of negotiations the University secretary threatened to restrict us from erecting the mock wall unless we remove all words that sounded "inflammatory" from the wall. These words included "Zionist", "Racist", "Apartheid", and "Illegal". When we argued that the the International Court of Justice had ruled that the Wall was illegal and should be demolished the only answer we got -via his representative in the Student Union- was "In the University we only deal with the University law not International law!" We had to spend £150 and two days of work to repaint the wall and remove the "inflammatory" wording. This is how it ended:

Last Wednesday was another proof that the University administration is definitely pro-Zionist. We planned to organise a whole-day activity as part of the International Week Against the wall which was supposed to include the "lovely" mock wall, an information stall, and a checkpoint theatre with drama scenes on the suffering of Palestinians under occupation. The day was supposed to be closed with a talk given by the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Ahron Cohen of Neturei Karta on the difference between Judaism as a faith an Zionist as a racist secular ideology; it was titled "Anti-Zionism IS NOT Antisemitism". We booked the Conference Auditorium five weeks in advance (but very unusually we had to wait three weeks before getting a booking confirmation). We informed the Societies Executive and started publicising the talk through posters, leaflets and the student newspaper. Just four days before the planned day of the talk the University Secretary contacted us and requested an urgent meeting with PSG to discuss the talk and stated that we had to work hard to persuade him not to cancel the talk using his capacity as a University Secretary. He claimed that we proke regulations by not informing him about it as the talk was found to be controversial. Such a claim could easily be refuted because the union regulations state clearly that it wasn't our duty -but rather the Societies executive- to decide on what is controversial and what is not. The Executive knew about it few weeks in advance and never approached us with her conclusion that the topic was controversial. It was very obvious that JSoc realised that they would sound foolish to request the Student Union to cancel the event for no reason and hence found their last resort in their saviour, Roger Gair.

I couldn't attend the meeting with the University Secretary, but those who did quoted him stating that he want our voice to be heard and he didn't want us to feel that we were silenced. That wasn't really reflected in the way how the meeting was going. PSG representatives had to be very hard-minded to make him convinced not to cancel or postpone the talk. However he started making impossible requests as conditions for the event to go ahead. He first asked if we could provide our own security guards as the University wouldn't be able to provide enough security for the talk. He then requested us to fill a very lengthy Risk assessment form in a couple of hours (The standard risk assessment form is less than half a page). But we overcame all obstacles and got all conditions satisfied on time.

On the day itself I was the first to arrive to the location where we usually erect the Wall to find that JSoc had already erected what they called "Wall 4 Peace" (They knew about our stall because we sent few emails about it to our mailing list). Half an hour later our wall and drama theatre were erected and installed and everything was going smoothly until we were approached by the the University's Head of Security ordering us not to act any drama scene as JSoc found it offensive (Oh yeah!)

This fake IOF soldier scared even the Palestinians!

This is JSoc's "Wall 4 Peace". Cool, isn't it?!

At about 5:00 PM i.e. one hour before the talk was supposed to start, Al-Jazeera English Channel team arrived to the university as they requested the night before to attend and film the talk. Rabbi Cohen arrived just few minutes after them. I welcomed them and left them together with another member of PSG and went to the talk venue to ensure that all arrangements were fine there. I had my personal video camera hanged on my shoulder and the moment the University Secretary saw me entering the Conference Auditorium with my camera he rushed toward me and said "If you think you will film inside you are mistaken", "Why? We always film our events" I questioned. He replied "This is not we agreed on; you didn't tell me about the filming" I answered "Why do we have to tell you about it. It's our event," and the only answer I got "And it's my venue!" Then he continued "You have two options: the first is keep this camera in your hand, and the second is to let this event go ahead." We had no option but to allow the talk to take place. Later on, Al-Jazeera team were not allowed to enter the Conference auditorium and they had to stay outside for two hours. When I questioned the head of security about it he went "for the last few years the university has been covered with a bad image in the media, and thus we placed a restricted policy on dealing with the media" (What an intelligent idea to improve the University's image in the media!)

The audience were half Zionists and half non-Zionists (not necessarily pro-Palestinians). Many students had their own cameras and when we complained about it we were told by the head of security that he couldn't seize everyone's digital camera or mobile phone. Thanks God it all worked to our benefit at the end as I managed so far to collect 1 Gigabyte of video footages and send them to Al-Jazeera (I should probably send a copy of the footages to Roger Gair to show him that dictatorship always goes wrong.)

We knew that the Zionists were attending the talk for no reason but to cause disorder and jeopardise the progress of the event. This was proved two seconds after the speaker walked into the conference room; two Zionist rabbis stood up and started shouting and heckling. they refused to shut up after several requests from the chair of the talk. They had the University Secretary standing literally two steps from them but he didn't utter a single word to stop their barbarism, but the moment a frustrated man from the audience requested the two vulgar Zionists to shut up the University secretary walked to him along with the Head of security and warned him that he would throw him out of the room if he repeats it again.

The Zionists continued this heckling throughout the talk and the Q&A session. When the President of the University's Islamic Society commenting on their uncivilised behaviour one Zionist student shouted "Do suicide members have manners?" No one from the University officials took any action against that coward.

One non-Zionist Jewish student who attended the talk commented on JSoc's savagery:

Yesterday I went to the meeting entitled "Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism" and thought that maybe we could have a productive debate, but no. The little old Rabbi Ahron Cohen who was giving the lecture was calm as he took abuse from so many JSoc members, despite the fact, as far as I can see his arguments were well thought out and more importantly scripturally valid. Orthodox gentlemen booed him and a number of terrible racist comments were made. When a student was asked to show politeness, he retorted by saying that, "suicide-bombers are not polite". Any criticism made of Israel was immediately shouted down or ignored. The rabbi, through it all was trying to argue his point and I think we should have listened to him. What I could see in eyes of people was fanatical nationalism, not in the spirit of Judaism.

I saw no compassion, just a desire to have their own victory. It wasn't about listening; it was about bashing the opinions of others. I hated the way many JSoc members paid lip-service to the idea of peace in the Middle-East when there attitudes spoke of a self-centeredness of "we are the only victims". Secondly, I hated the way that the JSoc members tried to speak for all Jews and tar me with their brush. I want nothing to do with Israel but I won't everything to do with Judaism, both peoples are hurting and I think it is Israel that causes the hurt in many ways.

In my next post I'll tell you about a battle of a different type which we'll be undergoing in the next couple of weeks to gain our right as PSG to speak freely on campus. For the time being I'll leave you with some excerpts from the rabbi's talk.

Anti-Zionism IS NOT Anti-Semitism :: A Talk at Leeds Uni

2006-11-12T22:48:00.000Z

The Palestinian Solidarity Group (PSG) at the University of Leeds
would like to invite you to:

"ANTI-ZIONISM IS NOT ANTI-SEMITISM"

A talk followed by questions by
The Orthodox Jewish Rabbi
Ahron Cohen

Wednesday 15th Nov @ 6:00 PM
Conference Auditorium 2
University of Leeds
(click here for directions to the University's main campus)

FMR now in Arabic

2006-10-30T05:24:00.000Z

recalling my post last month on the Forced Migration Review's (FMR) edition on Palestinian refugees, I thought it would be useful to inform you that the Arabic edition of the journal is now ready. You can find it here.

Please do give a visit to FMR's Arabic website http://www.hijra.org.uk.

The Iron Wall

2006-10-16T06:43:00.000+01:00

This is a must-see documentary

In 1923 Vladimir Jabotinsky, leading intellectual of the Zionist movement and father of the right wing of that movement, wrote: "Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population - behind an The Iron Wall , which the native population cannot breach." First published in Russian under the title O Zheleznoi Stene in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923.

From that day these words became the official and unspoken policy of the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel. Settlements were used from the beginning to create a Zionist foothold in Palestine.

The Iron Wall documentary exposes this phenomenon and follows the timeline, size, population of the settlements, and its impact on the peace process. This film also touches on the latest project to make the settlements a permanent fact on the ground; the wall that Israel is building in the West Bank and its impact on the Palestinian people.

Let the world know the truth, Spread the word...

And never say "I don't know" after today!

From Asira ... a story from the ongoing agony

2006-10-14T02:47:00.000+01:00

Prepared by: Mira Nabulsi
Palestine Media Unit (Zajel - Al-Najah University, Palestine)
7th May, 2006

The story of Northern Asira does not differ much from other besieged Palestinian villages. Eight kilometers north of Nablus, the village used to be a vital passage to other nearby northern villages, with a main road that was totally closed by the Israeli occupation forces at the beginning of Al-Aqsa Intifada five years ago.

A few years ago, the Asira road was a busy road full of citizens coming from northern towns and villages to the city of Nablus for medical care and shopping for essentials. Citizens of these areas now have to travel to Nablus using rough roads which are normally long, tiring and muddy, especially during the rainy season. Being old, sick or an infant is not a good enough excuse for Israeli soldiers who, for years, have continued to harden conditions on citizens, especially university students who are the most frequent users.

Recently, the Al Bathan road was opened for northern and north-western inhabitants as a substitute for the two main roads of Asira and Shave Shamron colony. Still things didn't ease - while previous roads took only seven minutes to Nablus, this one is taking 40 minutes on an ideal day – which of course never happens. Previous transportation costs are now more than double and, coupled with other growing expenses, families of students are finding it difficult to cope.

In response to these excessive Israeli procedures, with the participation of some international activists, residents of Asira demonstrated peacefully several times. Israeli soldiers reacted with hostility and threatened to shoot live bullets. Residents are starting to lose hope for any possible change in spite of the fact that, in an effort to solve the problem, they have also submitted petitions. Until now all their efforts have been ineffective, and daily travel to and from their village is dependant upon Israeli soldiers' moods more than anything else.
There have been reports from some residents of Asira, who happen to be students of An-Najah National University, that on their way to the campus they have experienced and witnessed violations which are affecting their basic human rights, and in particular their rights to an education. From this we have chosen the story of Amjad Yasin.

Amjad's story …. A memory he'll never forget:

“My story started the first time I ever went to the university. That evening I saw my friends and agreed to meet early in the morning. Word had spread that most of the roads were closed and that the way to Nablus was extremely complicated, so we agreed to meet at 4 o’clock the next morning. This was how I started my academic life and this was my schedule every morning. Sometimes, in order to continue my studies, delays meant that I had to walk kilometers.

The worst story, and one which I could never forget, was what happened to me one day during the holy month of Ramadan, a month when Muslims are required to fast. I was walking with some other inhabitants of my village when suddenly some Israeli soldiers started to chase us, shouting: “Stop… or we'll shoot”, and so we stopped. We were ordered to sit on the ground. They took our I.D’s and started checking them. I was the youngest among the group. After three hours, soldiers gave the other two people with me their I.D’s, while I was kept on the ground, tied and blindfolded. Several hours passed and I couldn’t move. My eyes started to cause a lot of pain as they were tied strongly, so I thought it would be good if I could stand up to move my body which had started to suffer from cramp from being in the same uncomfortable position for hours. But I could barely do this as soldiers started beating me, especially on my head. They threw me back to the ground and I felt the soldiers’ bodies pressing on my back. They continued torturing me for a long time and later one of the soldiers stood up close to my head and started shouting: “If you want us to leave you; say ‘Long Live Israel’”. I consistently tried to refuse but it was becoming unbearable.

It was getting dark, and sunset Athan, (call to prayer) was announced, when people ended their fast with an Iftar meal. I was still living what seemed to me an endless agony – the Israeli soldiers were still kicking and beating me until I had to concede: "Long Live Israel". I am sorry Palestine, but they forced me. This continued until late at night until, finally, an Israeli jeep arrived. They put me in it while I was still tied and after approximately half an hour they threw me somewhere else, in a place I couldn’t yet recognize. I managed to open my eyes and I was glad to see that I wasn’t very far from my village. I started walking, exhausted as I was, until I reached the first house in the village. By this time it was almost 2 a.m.

This is one of the harshest memories I have from the daily ongoing sufferance on my way to and from the university. I hope whoever reads this will understand the misery of my people and will relay its sadness to the rest of the world in the hope that one day we Palestinians will get some of our violated pride back.”

Story by: Khaled Jamal Burini – Engineering Faculty.
Amjad Wadee’ Yaseen – Economics Faculty.

This Body is a Prison

2006-10-13T00:27:00.000+01:00

Few months ago a Palestinian speaker was addressing the audience when he said "Palestinians are the best nation in the world". I found that to be very racist and arrogant that I was about to lose my temper and rage at him but thanks God I controlled myself. By time I myself am accepting that statement more and more. Palestinians can't be normal human beings, otherwise they should have committed a collective suicide long time ago because any comparison between death and the current living conditions of the Palestinians will definitely tilt in favour of the former. So yes Palestinians are super heroes, but we need not to forget that even Superman himself died at the end when an alien called Doomsday came down to Earth and killed him. Palestinians are no stronger than Superman but Doomsday is an insignificant element when compared to the savage Zionist beast the Palestinians have been suffering because of for more than 58 years. The hourglass sand is already running out!

Watch and spread the word

Action Alert : : Zionists Play With Fire

2006-10-11T13:15:00.000+01:00

Source: palestine-info.co.uk

Oct 10, 2006, 09:18

Occupied Jerusalem - Kamal Al-Khatib, the deputy leader of the Islamic Movement in the 1948 areas (Israel), has warned that desecrating the holy Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem would lead to a "big fire" in the region.

Khatib affirmed that any such desecration would lead to violent reactions that would be greater than the previous Aqsa intifada.

Commenting on the fanatic Israeli MP Uri Ariel's forced entry into the holy shrine on Monday, Khatib charged that the storming in the given circumstances pointed to approval of the official Israeli security apparatuses.

Ariel, of the extremist Mifdal party, toured the plazas in the holy site on Monday exploiting the Israeli intensified security presence to protect Jewish celebration of the Sukkot holiday, which blocked entry of Muslim worshippers to the Aqsa Mosque.

Ariel told Hebrew daily 'Ma'ariv' that his "visit" was meant to remind the world that the (Jewish) temple, which the Jews say should be built on the ruins of the holy Mosque on "the temple mount", represented the "Jewish people's throbbing heart".

"It is about time that all Jews should offer their prayers here (Aqsa Mosque)," he added.

Silence is all what I hear; no condemnation, no denouncement, nothing but absolute silence! If a normal Muslim (not an MP) openly declared he/she wants to take over and seize the Vatican or the Church of the Ascension in Jerusalem (which would never happen) all Muslims of the world would be bombarded with racist insults and accusations of terrorism and barbarism. But when it comes to a Zionist Jewish "Israeli" MP such as the bughouse terrorist above threatening to destroy the third holiest site for Muslims no one should be bothered, they are MUSLIMS!

Action Needed:

Forward the news article to your national and local interfaith organisations or forums urging them to publicly condemn and denounce the Israeli threats to one of the holiest sites for 1.5 billion followers of the Islamic faith (of all origins and races).

If you are in the UK you can email the "Inter Faith Network for the UK" on ifnet@interfaith.org.uk
For a list of national and local interfaith organisations in the UK visit http://www.interfaith.org.uk/members.htm
If you are anywhere else, Google your national or local interfaith organisation.

Please give it few minutes of your time

Together we can make the difference

Just because they are Palestinians

2006-10-09T03:27:00.000+01:00

After the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq the targeted killing of Palestinians covertly still goes on, carried on by previously unseen death squads. People are killed just because they are Palestinians.

The Italian TV channel Rainews 24 report "The displaced people take flight", by Flaviano Masella edited by Maurizio Torrealta reveals the unbearable situation of hundreds of people with many interviews. They are trying to run away from a massacre that looks like last century's ethnic cleansings.

The interviews were made in Jordan in Ruwayshed refugee camp, which is located in a desert along the way that connects Amman and Baghdad.

The camp is run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and hosts hundreds of Palestinians. They live in tents: in summer temperature can reach 50 degrees and in winter 0 degrees.

Women, men, children and old people got stuck in this camp waiting endlessly to go back to their normal life (if there was any!)

English Version

Arabic Version

Zionists defeated in High Court!

2006-10-09T02:44:00.000+01:00

If all leaders of the world were brave enough to speak the truth this planet would definitely be a more peaceful place to live on.

BBC NEWS (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/5410872.stm)

Ken's suspension order thrown out

The Mayor of Londno Ken Livingstone's four-week suspension from the mayor's office has been quashed by a High Court judge.

He was suspended for his remarks to a Jewish journalist likening him to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

The exchange with Oliver Finegold happened as the mayor left an event in February last year.

The mayor was challenging a decision by the Adjudication Panel for England that his comments breached the Greater London Authority's code of conduct.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has demanded an apology from the mayor, regardless of the outcome of the case.

"What he doesn't seem to accept is a number of constituents for whom heis actually mayor - that is Holocaust survivors and the Jewish community - were offended by what he said and that apology he seems tohave problems in giving," Jon Benjamin, the chief executive of the organisation, said.

At the High Court, Mr Justice Collins said the suspension would be overturned, regardless of whether or not the mayor won his appeal against the Adjudication Panel for England's finding.

The judge said: "I have made it clear the suspension will be quashed whatever I decide on whether the Panel's finding wascorrect."

He reserved his final judgment on Mr Livingstone's appeal to a later date, saying: "It is not an easy case. There are certain ramifications, whatever I decide, which will affect other matters."

Flawed decision

The public were "heartily sick of the whole saga", Mr Benjamin said.

"I think we probably know what the chances of the mayor apologising now are, so we're not holding our breath," he said.

During the two-day hearing, Mr Livingstone's lawyers argued the panel's decision, made in February, was legally flawed on a number of grounds.

This included the fact the Mayor had not been acting in his official capacity at the time of the incident.

The panel's ruling was defended by the Ethical Standards Officer, who referred the case to the disciplinary body.

The ESO contended the Mayor's arguments were over-complicated and "trivialised" the code of conduct and there was no basis for the judge substituting his own judgment for that of the panel.

John Biggs, Labour's London Assembly member for Cityand London, welcomed the judge's decision to quash the order saying: "It should be for Londoners to decide if the Mayor should be removed from office and not an unelected quango. I am pleased that the judge agrees with us."

If the appeal fails, Mr Livingstone will be responsible for paying his own legal costs, estimated at £80,000, although he will continue to be paid.

Palestine ... The Diaspora Remembered

2006-10-06T03:09:00.000+01:00

Last January the Palestinian Solidarity Group (PSG) in my university published this 2006 wall calendar with valuable information on the Palestinian Diaspora. I know it's quite late to be used as a calendar but I still thought I'll post it here so that people can make use of the information it contains. (Click on the image below to download a reading-quality PDF file of the calendar -- Be patient as the file size is 1.5 MB).

If we are to produce a similar calendar for 2007, what topic you think would be the best as a theme for that calendar? (e.g. the wall, education ... etc).

The Palestinians of the Indian Ocean

2006-10-03T16:56:00.000+01:00

I always wanted to tell you the story of our brothers in struggle but I never had enough time to do so; I hope today I do. Somewhere in the middle of the Indian ocean lie seven paradisiacal atolls and more than sixty fascinating islands. They all form the Chagos Archipelago. This place is like no other place on earth and its story is so unique for it inherits a lot from the mother of all odysseys of struggle for freedom and justice, Palestine.

To start with, I'll leave you for few minutes with an extract of John Pilger's "Out of Eden"

In long-forgotten archives in London and Mauritius is rare film of a community of contented people. The grainy, flickering images, full of movement of children playing on sandy beaches, and proud young women presenting their newborn for christening, and men setting out to fish, their dogs swimming alongside, are glimpses of a true paradise. There are thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a light railway, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty: strings of coral atolls, floating in the turquoise of the Indian Ocean.

These were some of the 2,000 people who once lived on the Chagos archipelago, the majority on Diego Garcia, an atoll the shape of a tiny Italy, 14 miles long and six miles wide. Their ancestry went back to the 18th century, when the French brought slaves from Mozambique and Madagascar to work a coconut plantation. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the islands passed from French to British rule; about 20 years later, slavery was abolished.

Chagossian society continued to grow with the arrival of indentured labourers from India in the mid-19th century. By the 20th century they had developed a distinct language that was a lilting variation of French Creole. There were now three copra factories, supplying the coconut oil that lit street lamps in London, and a coaling station for ships en route to and from Australia; by the 1960s, there were plans for tourism. The workers received a small wage or payment in kind with commodities such as rice, oil and milk. They supplemented this by fishing in the abundantly stocked coastal waters, growing tomatoes, chilli, pumpkins and aubergines, and rearing chicken and ducks. As if celebrating a perfect vision of empire in such a place, a Colonial Office film from the 1950s describes the population as "born and brought up ... in conditions most tranquil and benign". The camera pans across a laughing woman hanging out clothes to dry in a coconut grove while her children play around her. This is Charlesia Alexis.

I met Charlesia recently, 50 years after she was filmed. She was sitting in the shade of her small, sparsely furnished house on the edge of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius, more than 1,000 miles from her home. I asked her for her fondest memories of Diego Garcia. "Oh, everything!" she replied. "The sense of wellbeing is my fondest souvenir. My family could eat and drink what they liked; we never lacked for anything; we never bought anything, except clothes. Can you imagine that?"

"Why did you leave?"

"I left in 1967. My husband was very ill and I decided to take him to Port Louis to get the special treatment he needed. When we were ready to return, we went to Rogers & Company [they ran the boats] and asked for our tickets. They said they had instructions not to let us go back. They said Diego had been sold."

"Sold?"

"Yes, that's what they said. We were tricked. Looking back, the day before we left, the administrator told us to take a lot of fruit with us. They tricked us in so many ways, and when this game had run its course, they deported everyone, just like that. I was the fourth generation. Diego was my bird in the sky that was taken from me. I was sent to live in a slum, in rooms previously inhabited by goats and pigs. That's how they saw us."

Before you continue with Pilger's story, let's start the engines and fly "down" to Diego Garcia

I'll leave you again with the story until I bring the aircraft down to a lower altitude so that we can have a clearer look at the island.

What happened in the Chagos Islands was so searing, it may seem barely credible. Indeed La Lutte, as the Chagossians call their struggle for justice and freedom, arose from a crime that allows us to glimpse how great power works behind its respectable, democratic facade and how governments justify their actions with lies.

During the 1960s and 1970s, British governments, both Labour and Tory, tricked and expelled the entire population of the Chagos, a British colonial dependency, so that their homeland could be given to a foreign power, the United States, as the site for a military base. This "act of mass kidnapping", as one observer describes it, was carried out in high secrecy, along with the conspiracy that preceded it. For almost a decade, neither parliament nor the US Congress knew anything about it, and no journalist revealed it. BBC newsreaders still refer to US aircraft flying out to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq from the "uninhabited" island of Diego Garcia. Not only was the Chagossians' homeland stolen from them, but they were taken out of history. This scandal is unresolved today - even though the high court in London has twice ruled that the islanders' "wholesale removal" was an "abject legal failure".

The year was 1961. Two men strode up the jetty on Diego Garcia, filmed by missionaries unaware of the significance of their visitors. One was Rear Admiral Grantham of the US Navy, the leader of an American advance survey team whose objective was to find an island suitable for a military base that would allow Washington to dominate the Indian Ocean and beyond. For the next three years, British and American planners and engineers inspected the Chagos group. Finally, they selected the nearby island of Aldabra.

Their secret decision leaked out to the scientists of the Royal Society in London, who were horrified. Together with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, this formidable establishment body mounted a campaign that saw off the Ministry of Defence and Admiral Grantham. The island's precious wildlife, including the giant land tortoise and the last flightless bird, were safe. The second choice, however, was not. This was Diego Garcia which, although rich in terrestrial and marine life, was not unique enough to excite the collective indignation of naturalists.
As for the presence of a flourishing human population, this was "not an insurmountable problem", advised the Foreign Office, for people could be "removed" and "the outside world [presented] with a scenario in which there were no permanent inhabitants on the archipelago".

In February 1964, a secret Anglo-American conference was held in London, at which the final decision was taken. Again, parliament was not informed. The following April, Anthony Greenwood, the colonial secretary in Harold Wilson's Labour government, flew to Mauritius, then a British colony that included the Chagos Islands. Greenwood spelled out the terms for granting independence to Mauritius. Despite United Nations Resolution 1514, which held that all colonial peoples had an inalienable right to independence without conditions, Greenwood offered it with strings. Mauritius could be free as long as Britain could keep the Chagos archipelago. The bribe was a mere £3m, together with a promise to support Mauritian sugar preferences.

Thus Charlesia's homeland was "sold". On November 8 1965, in the twilight of its colonial era, Britain created a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), whose principal territory was the Chagos Islands. It was a ruse of which perhaps only Britain's ancien régime was capable; for the new colony was a fake, an entity created for the sole purpose of handing it over for the use of the American military. This was made possible by using the archaic powers of the royal prerogative, a throwback to the divine right of kings.
Although barely reported in the press, word of this manoeuvre reached the United Nations in New York, spurring the General Assembly to pass Resolution 2066, which called on the British government "to take no action which would dismember the territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity". This was ignored.

In December 1966, Lord Chalfont, a Foreign Office minister, signed a contract in Washington giving the Pentagon a 50-year "lease" on Diego Garcia with an automatic extension of 20 years. Declassified state department documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act in 2005 reveal that Washington wanted the entire population expelled; as one official put it, the islands were to be "swept" and "sanitised". This was described in a secret file as "a neat, sensible package".

In 1974,a joint UK-US question-and-answer "official truth" primer for embassies around the world asked: "Is there a native population on the Chagos Islands?" The reply was "No." A Ministry of Defence spokesman denied this was a lie, in the process uttering perhaps the most amazing lie of all. "There is nothing in our files," he said, "about inhabitants or about an evacuation." It was not until 1975 that the US Senate revealed that the British government had been secretly "compensated" for the Chagos with a discount of $14m off the price of a Polaris nuclear submarine. This itself was illegal, as it was never submitted to Congress for approval; and the document Chalfont signed stated falsely that the US would pay no rent for acquiring "base rights". There was no mention of a population.

You can take a break now and enjoy watching the paradise from the sky

John Pilger still has more to tell us ...

Lizette Talate is also in the Colonial Office film. She was 14 years old at the time and remembers the producer saying to her and her friends, "Keep smiling, girls!" Sitting in her kitchen in Port Louis, she says, "We didn't need to be told. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in Diego. My great-grandmother was born on Diego, and my grandmother was born there, and my mother was born there, and I was born there. I made six children there. Maybe only the English can make a film that showed we were an established community, then deny their own evidence and invent the lie that we were transient workers. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out."

"How did they terrify you?" I asked.

"They tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, and everything was scarce. There was no milk, no dairy products, no oil, no sugar, no salt. When they couldn't starve us out of our homes, they spread rumours that we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

The Chagossians love their dogs; they are inseparable. The plan to kill all the dogs on the island - with its unsubtle implication that humans might be next - came from Sir Bruce Greatbatch, then Her Majesty's Governor of the Seychelles. "At first they tried poisoned fish balls," said Lizette. "That killed a few and left many in terrible agony. Then they paid a man to walk round with a big stick beating them to death, or trying to. Finally, American soldiers, who had already begun to arrive, gassed them, and the bodies - many still alive - were thrown on to a shelf that usually held the flesh of coconuts as it was cooked ... children listened to the howls of their pets being burned to death."

Along with 180 others, Lizette and her family were forced on to the vessel Nordvaer, which had plied between the Chagos and Mauritius and the Seychelles, transporting copra and taking supplies back to the islands. The men were herded on to the bridge and had to stand or crouch in very rough weather; the women and children were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser - bird shit. People vomited and suffered diarrhoea; two women miscarried.

"Even water was scarce," says Lizette. "What I can't forget is the fear and uncertainty for myself and my family. When we got to the Seychelles, the police were waiting for us. They marched us up the hill to a prison, where we were kept in cells until the boat was ready to take us on to Mauritius.

"I suppose we took some hope in the promise that in Mauritius we would be granted a house, a piece of land, animals and a sum of money. We got nothing."

The former president of Mauritius, Cassam Uteem, who has championed the Chagossians' rights, told me: "You can't imagine how bewildered and terrified they were ... These were a people who would sing their way through life; and here they were, weeping their way through life, and they are still weeping.

"I know of one lady who lost two children within two or three months, and she wasn't able even to perform their funerals because she didn't have any money. The children were taken from the hospital straight to the cemetery. That lady is still weeping."

Lizette is that lady. She lost Jollice, aged eight, and Regis, aged 10 months. Her husband died soon afterwards. "They died of sadness," she tells me. "It is true, because the doctor said he could not treat sadness. Lizette is a wiry, formidably intelligent woman who wears a mask of grief and determination. "I am going home," she says. "I am not to be pitied; I am fighting."

Ok, now let's see; The shameless British government, which was brought to power by the British themselves, granted Palestine, a land that belonged to no one but the Palestinians, to the Zionist Jews to build the Zionist, racist, apartheid, illegal, cancer state of "Israel". Another selfish British government, again brought forward by the British people, offered Diego Garcia paradise to the Americans for a $14m discount, disregarding the lives of hundreds of thousands of the true owners of that paradise. So what did the Americans do with that atoll?

But the story hasn't finished yet ...

By 1975, the Chagossians in exile began to die from their imposed poverty. Most were unemployed and penniless and either sharing a slum or sleeping rough. In a letter to an MP, a Foreign Office official wrote: "Although we have no information about deaths, some deaths are bound to have occurred in the normal course of events."

That was a lie. The Foreign Office had sent a senior official, ARG Prosser, to investigate; he had sent back a graphically detailed report on the islanders' living conditions and advised that "something needs to be done".

The government's response was to offer a minuscule £650,000 in compensation to the entire population. Even this did not arrive until 1978, five years after the last islander had been deported.

In 1981, several hundred Chagossian women converged on the British High Commission in Port Louis, sat down and sang, and demanded proper compensation. Thanks to their protest, it appeared that progress was being made on compensation. On March 27 1982, a group of the most impoverished islanders accepted a "full and final" settlement of £4m - less than half the estimated minimum that they could survive on. But on what the islanders wanted most - the right to return - there was a deafening silence.

In the 1990s, the islanders' struggle took a dramatic turn when a treasure trove of declassified official documents was discovered in the National Archives at Kew, in London. This provided the narrative of a conspiracy between two governments to carry out, in the words of Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court, the "deportation or forcible transfer of a population ... a crime against humanity".

On July 28 1965, a senior Foreign Office official, TCD Jerrom, wrote to the British representative at the United Nations, FDW Brown, instructing him to lie to the general assembly that the Chagos Islands were "uninhabited when the United Kingdom government first acquired them". This Brown did on November 16 1965. He also misrepresented the population as "labourers from Mauritius and the Seychelles" for whom Britain's obligations under the United Nations Charter "did not apply", and he lied that the "new administrative arrangements" had been "freely worked out with the ... elected representatives of the people concerned".

In a secret memorandum, a Colonial Office official, KWS MacKenzie, spelt out the truth. "One of the things we would like to do in the new Territory," he wrote, "is to convert all the existing residents into short-term, temporary residents by giving them temporary immigration permits, describing them as inhabitants of Mauritius or the Seychelles."

Reading the files, it is clear that the British government did as it was told by Washington. Mass deportation, wrote a Foreign Office official, "was made virtually a condition of the agreement [with the Americans] when we negotiated it in 1965".

What these files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality and contempt. On August 24 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls."

At the bottom of the page is a postscript handwritten by DA Greenhill, another senior official, who became Baron Greenhill of Harrow.

"Unfortunately," he wrote, "along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc. When this has been done, I agree we must be very tough."
The cover-up went to the very top. On November 5 and 8 1965, the Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood, wrote two secret minutes to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in which he described the problem of a "population of 1,000 inhabitants" living in the Chagos. He urged that the Queen quickly approve the "order-in-council detaching the islands" so that the new colony could be declared and "we should be able to present the UN with a fait accompli".

So when Wilson gave the green light to the order-in-council, he was aware he was overriding the legal and human rights of British citizens. He was stealing their country and ignoring the risks of "dumping unemployables in heavily over-populated Mauritius", as one honest Foreign Office official warned, not to mention the incalculable suffering this ensured.

Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, a quiet, grey-haired, grandfatherly-looking man, took charge of the deceit. Writing secretly to Wilson on July 25 1968, he proposed that the government lie to the world that there was "no indigenous population", even though he had signed a memorandum circulating in the cabinet which admitted that "there was an indigenous population and the Foreign Office knew it".

On April 26 1969, Wilson's private secretary wrote to Stewart that the prime minister approved the "plan". Seven successive British governments have - to recall the memorable expression of a Foreign Office legal adviser in 1969 - maintained the fiction.

In his two autobiographies, Denis Healey, who was defence secretary in the Wilson government and responsible for turning Diego Garcia over to the Pentagon, makes not a single mention of the expulsion of the population. In 2004, I asked Healey for an interview. He replied, "I fear I have no memories of the Chagos archipelago. Sorry."

On May 6 1969, Healey's private secretary wrote to Downing Street, confirming that the Defence Secretary had read Stewart's plan and "agrees with its recommendations". Healey even queried the cost of expelling the population and sought an assurance that any "excess" above £10m would not be borne by his department.

The "policy of concealment" (as a Foreign Office file called it) ran almost to the end of the century - until the files at Kew were cracked open. Armed with this extraordinary evidence, Richard Gifford, the tireless lawyer representing the islanders, headed for the courts. In October 2000, Lizette Talate, Charlesia Alexis and others, led by a courageous islander, Olivier Bancoult, flew to London to give evidence in a high court action that challenged the legality of their dispossession.

The government had feared this, and, prior to the hearing, the Foreign Office mounted a disinformation campaign, led by Peter Hain. "The outer islands," Hain told the House of Commons, "have been uninhabited for 30 years, so any resettlement would present serious problems, both because of the practical feasibility and in relation to our treaty obligations."

A "treaty" implied an agreement scrutinised by parliament. There was no treaty: only a secret, criminal deal. On November 3 2000, in the high court, Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Gibbs stunned the government.

Citing the Magna Carta, which proscribed "Exile from the Realm" without due process, they unanimously squashed the 1965 ordinance used to deport the islanders as unlawful.

Lizette and Charlesia at last could go home, it seemed. But the Blair government had other ideas. That afternoon, the Foreign Office published a new immigration ordinance that banned the islanders from returning to Diego Garcia. Once again, "treaty obligations" with Washington were cited.

In 2003, the islanders were back in the high court, now seeking compensation. But this time they faced a judge who described the case as "unmeritorious" and "hopeless", and awarded the islanders not a penny - a decision "welcomed" by Bill Rammell, the Foreign Office minister responsible for the Chagos.

The following year, Rammell employed the same sleight of hand that the Wilson government had used to expel the islanders in the 1960s, when he sent an order-in-council to the Queen for her rubber-stamped approval. This overturned the Chagossians' high court victory of 2000 in its entirety and and banned the islanders from ever returning home. The order-in-council appeared on a list of innocuous royal decrees, between an amendment to the royal charter of the College of Optometrists and the appointment of Her Majesty's education inspectors for Scotland. No reason was given; a privy councillor simply read out the fate of thousands of Her Majesty's most vulnerable, abused and wronged subjects.

Richard Gifford and the islanders refused to accept this and were back in the high court last year. On May 11, two judges found unreservedly in their favour, describing the government's behaviour as illegal, repugnant and irrational. The government is considering an appeal, knowing that the Americans, having attacked Iraq and Afghanistan from Diego Garcia, are furious. The bombing of Iran is planned to take place from this British territory. Both governments apparently still believe they can "wear down" the islanders' resolve. They are mistaken, I can assure them.

I add my voice to John Pilger and assure the British and American governments that they are mistaken. Just before we conclude let me take you to the British Parliament's House of Common where we can have a flavour of the debate that took place on the 7th of July 2004 discussing an official report published by the government on the resettlement of the islanders. You can read the full text of the debate here. You will laugh as you never did before. It's a circus not a Parliament!

Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow) (Lab): These days, we are all too familiar with conducting foreign policy on the basis of false or misleading facts. The historical record now revealed by the islanders' legal struggle has after 30 years shown that a small and vulnerable population of British subjects can safely be written out of the history book on the pretext that they are not really a population at all. There is nothing new in deceiving the world while acting in breach of civilised standards of international and constitutional law ...

Mr. John Grogan (Selby) (Lab): I am pleased to be able to make a brief contribution to the debate. I am relatively new to this subject, but when I read the press reports a few weeks ago I could not believe that the Government, whom I so strongly support, are taking this action. I know the Minister to be a good man, and I cannot believe that his sleep is not a little troubled due to these problems.

The test of any Government, or any man or woman, is how they deal with injustices felt by powerless people. I urge the Minister to make a stand on this issue; if there are forces beyond his office, outside or within the Foreign Office, that are urging this course of action, I urge him to take a stand. I have looked at the press release—that is all we can go on as to the reasons why we are taking this action. I could see four: the risk of flooding; the precarious nature of life for any people who return; the effect on the delicate marine and terrestrial life caused by people who return; and the cost.

With regard to the risk of flooding, I have consulted one or two experts on the level of the land there, and a lot of it is higher than that in East Anglia. We know about flooding in my constituency of Selby, and if we accepted the argument on flooding that the Government are using, half of my constituency would be depopulated. Some outlying islands were inhabited in the past, and some were based on banks that were shifting in storms. There were tall copra trees on the islands and the inhabitants had worked out a mode of living—growing copra successfully, and in some cases raising huts on stilts. The argument does not seem overwhelming to me.

We have talked about the precarious nature of the life that would face any islanders who returned to the outer islands. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) was rather restrained and understated in quoting the American publicity about the islands. I shall detain the Chamber for a moment to give a little more flavour of what the US navy says about Diego Garcia in its message to its recruits. It says that Diego Garcia boasts

"unbelievable recreational facilities and exquisite natural beauty"

as well as "outstanding" living conditions. There is no mention of the threat of imminent demise from flooding. In fact, I understand that the US is seeking to extend the lease on its base, which would expire in 2016, so it is thinking long term. There is a windsurfers club, a yacht club, an annual Miss Diego Garcia competition, regular picnics to what the US describes as some of the best unspoiled beaches in the world, fishing, snorkelling and a beauty parlour. It does not sound that precarious to me.
As for the delicate marine and terrestrial life, the impact of the 1,500 US personnel, the British personnel, the 2,000 civilian contractors and the various military equipment must be at least as worrying, if it is the major concern, as the effect of some islanders returning to the outer islands.

Mr. Hopkins : It occurs to me that with all the wonderful facilities at Diego Garcia, the American forces must have first-class health provision. Would it not be a generous offer if the Americans provided health services for the returning islanders in return for occupying part of their islands?

Mr. Grogan : That would be a very generous gesture, shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps it could be the first gesture of President Kerry in November or December.

I would be interested to hear the Minister comment on whether any payment by the US Government has ever been made. Officially, the Foreign Office denies it, but time and again the suggestion in the literature is that the British Government at the time got a $14 million reduction in the cost of the Polaris nuclear missile system. I do not know whether that is true.

Clearly, with all the magnificent leisure, tourism and health facilities, it would not be beyond the wit of man or woman to develop a tourism strategy for the islands—perhaps the North Yorkshire tourist office could give some advice. I have a marginal seat, so perhaps there will be a job for me there. In any case, we do not seem to be dealing with a basket case of an economy, and I think the Minister knows that in his heart. It would be a great sadness for me and for other Members—present and not present—if a Labour Government did not bring justice to these islanders who have very little power. I appeal to the Minister to think again.

Mr. Salmond : Are there any weapons of mass destruction?

Tom Brake : It is not possible to see any weapons of mass destruction, but there are some very large hangars.

Mr. Rammell : The report says:

"Even in the short term, natural events such as periodic flooding from storms and seismic activity are likely to make life difficult for a resettled population."
It also says:
"Human interference within the atolls, however well managed, is likely to exacerbate stress on the marine and terrestrial environment and will accelerate the effects of global warming. Thus resettlement is likely to become less feasible over time."
The report advised specifically, with respect to climate change, that
"the main issue facing a resettled population on the low-lying islands will be flooding events, which are likely to increase in periodicity and intensity and will not only threaten infrastructure, but also the freshwater aquifers and agricultural production. Severe events may even threaten life."
It also highlighted the implications for resettlement on such low-lying islands of the predicted increase in global sea levels as a result of climate change. That is where the facts, as my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) said, need to be taken into account.
It is worth highlighting that the highest points on the islands are only about 2 metres above sea level and, in most areas, are just a couple of feet above sea level. We have to make a judgment, but not on whether we already have an existing, settled population who we need to protect and support. We are talking about islands where there is no settled population at the moment. That is the factor that we must take into account. In effect, therefore, as I said in my statement to the House on 15 June, anything other than short-term resettlement on a purely subsistence basis would be highly precarious and would involve expensive underwriting by the UK Government for an open-ended period, and probably permanently.
We made an assessment based upon comparative costings with other overseas territories with which we have significant experience, and we believe that the initial resettlement costs would be of the order of £5 million in start-up costs and £3 million to £5 million annually thereafter. The Department for International Development thinks that those estimates are overly optimistic and that the costs may well be higher. We are not talking about minimal costs.
Tom Brake : Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Rammell : I will not give way.
If one is prepared to sign a blank cheque for resettlement, one can repopulate, but we have a responsibility and significant contingent liabilities with the overseas territories and we must take accounts of costs.
Mr. Salmond : The sums that the Minister mentions are very small compared with the enormity of the issue and the blot on the moral conscience. Does the European convention on human rights apply to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and does the International Criminal Court have jurisdiction over Diego Garcia under the terms of the American lease?
Mr. Rammell : As I understand it, the ECHR does not apply, as there is no settled population. With regard to the hon. Gentleman's other question, I will respond later because I do not want to give a response that is not entirely accurate.
Due to the fact that settlement is not feasible, the Government decided after long and careful consideration—that was genuinely the case—to legislate to prevent it. Equally, however, legislation to restore full immigration control over the entire territory is also necessary, and I do not absolve ourselves from responsibility for this so as to ensure and maintain the availability and effective use of the territory for defence purposes for which it was constituted and set aside in accordance with the UK's treaty obligations entered into almost 40 years ago.
On that basis, two prerogative Orders in Council were made on 10 June restoring full immigration control over the islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Those controls extended to all persons, including members of the Chagossian community. This point has been made on several occasions, but a prerogative Order in Council is the normal way in which the UK Government legislate for an overseas territory. Indeed, legislation in that form on BIOT has been entered into in the past.

Excuse me your honours but all that discussion was rubbish. Now I fully understand how we lost Palestine and how Chagos people lost their homeland. It is so stupid to believe that £5 million per annum is too prohibitive of a cost to resettle all the islanders back in their homeland (I need to point out that the whole discussion was excluding Diego Garcia as it is not even negotiable to displease the American "Big Mamma"!)

If the British are truly sincere in atoning for their unforgivable sin, the least they should be doing now is starting an airlift or sealift to transfer all Chagossian scattering allover the world back to their homeland, including Diego Garcia, no matter how much it costs, whether that was millions of sterling pounds or a severe deterioration of the US-UK relations. This is the only way how we can still keep some hope the the British government ministers, members of Parliament, and all those electing them still have some sense of humanitarian equity and responsibility.

And always remember that the mother of all freedom and return odysseys, Palestine, is yet to be freed and that the Palestinian refugees are yet to return.

Useful links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/05/12/wchag12.xml

Official site of the UK PJHQ Overseas Bases, Diego Garcia.

Diego Garcia Timeline posted at the Center for Cooperative Research

Photo and written library of the islands and their environment

Diego Garcia "Camp Justice", GlobalSecurity.org

US/UK BIOT defence agreements, 1966-1982, US Court filing

Where in the World Is Diego Garcia?, Infoplease.com

Simon Winchester on Diego Garcia, in Granta Magazine

Diego Garcia on Google Maps

Diego Garcia: Paradise Cleansed, by John Pilger

The Jewel in the Pentagon's Crown, by Gisle Tangenes, BitsofNews.com

Atoll Research Bulletin 149: Geography and Ecology of Diego Garcia Atoll

She Is 6 Today!

2006-09-28T16:02:00.000+01:00

(Click on the image for the full-size poster)

UN envoy says Gaza a prison for Palestinians :: Read & Take Action

2006-09-27T03:32:00.000+01:00

Source: Reuters
Tue Sep 26, 2006 11:51am ET
By Richard Waddington
GENEVA (Reuters) - Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians where life is "intolerable, appalling, tragic" and the Jewish state appears to have thrown away the key, a U.N. human rights envoy said on Tuesday.
U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory John Dugard said that the suffering of the Palestinians was a test of the readiness of the international community to protect human rights.
"If ... the international community cannot ... take some action, (it) must not be surprised if the people ... disbelieve that they are seriously committed to the promotion of human rights," he told the United Nations' Human Rights Council.
Israel hit back saying there was an "alarming disconnect" between the rapporteur's report to the U.N.'s human rights watchdog and the experience of Israelis who continued to "face the daily threat of Palestinian terrorism".
The South African lawyer, who has been a special U.N. investigator since 2001, repeated earlier accusations that Israel is breaking international humanitarian law with security measures which amount to "collective punishment."
Israel says its security restrictions, which include the construction of a steel and concrete barrier in the West Bank, are designed to stop suicide bombers entering Israel. Bombings have declined since the barrier was built.
It also maintains tight restrictions on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza, a coastal strip that it pulled out of last year after 38 years of occupation.
"UNPUNISHED"
Dugard also attacked the United States, the European Union and Canada for withdrawing funding for the Palestinian Authority in protest at the governing party Hamas's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist.
"Israel violates international law as expounded by the Security Council and the International Court of Justice and goes unpunished. But the Palestinian people are punished for having democratically elected a regime unacceptable to Israel, the U.S. and the EU," Dugard said.
But Israel's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva Itzhak Levanon said that by putting the "entire blame" on Israel the report "absolves the terrorists that have taken Palestinian society hostage from even the most minimal responsibility."
Dugard said that three-quarters of Gaza's 1.4 million people were dependent on food aid. Bombing raids by Israel since the June 25 capture of an army corporal by Palestinian militants had destroyed houses and the territory's only power plant.
"Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key," he said.
The West Bank also faced a humanitarian crisis, albeit not as extreme as Gaza, in part due to the barrier, which Dugard alleged was no longer being justified by Israel on security grounds but was part of a move to annex more land.
Palestinians living between the barrier and the Green Line, the frontier at the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, could no longer freely access schools and places of work and many had abandoned local farms, he said.
"In other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing but political correctness forbids such language where Israel is concerned," Dugard said.

Watch Dugard's speech here,

And his answers to the Human Rights Council members here.

Read Dugard's full report on the Israeli violations published on the 17th of January of 2006 here,

And his most recent report published on the 5th of September 2006 here.

Take action:

- Forward this article and spread the word about the Israeli barbarism, and the American and European involvement in starving and punishing the Palestinians for practicing democracy.

- Click here to forward the above report to Kofi Annan (inquiries@un.org) and the President of the European Commission (sg-web-president@ec.europa.eu). Make sure you add your personal message in the given space.

- Send a Thank You email to John Dugard (c.j.r.dugard@law.leidenuniv.nl) for his efforts to expose the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians and for daring to speak out the truth despite the fact that this is probably the most dangerous thing to do these days.

Please give it few minutes of your time

Together we can make the difference

Action Alert: Peace One Day

2006-09-21T00:31:00.000+01:00

Today, the 21st of September, marks the International Day of Peace. For most nations of the world it is a gleam of hope that peace will prevail one day. For the Palestinians this day is no different from any other day they lived -barely- under the occupation of the biggest threat to world peace, "Israel".

In October 2005, the European Commission conducted a survey representing the EU's member nations with the question of which country presents the biggest threat to the world peace. Israel came first with 59 percent of the votes.

Nevertheless, Our world, the whole world, is becoming so ignorant and so blind that the butcher is being treated as a victim and the victims are not even considered human enough to be dealt with.

Peace can prevail one day, but never with the current Israeli policy of occupation and apartheid in place. If the world is honestly committed to peace then all nations of the globe should unite against the Israeli barbarism just as firm as we all stood against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

If you build a house you start with one brick.
If we want to build peace why not start with one day...
and that day has arrived.

Jeremy Gilley (The British director and founder of the UN Peace Day)

Action Needed

Send an Email to:

- The President of the European Commission
sg-web-president@ec.europa.eu

- The UN Secretary General
inquiries@un.org

- George W. Bush
president@whitehouse.gov

requesting them to stop acting against the wish of the World, European, and American nations and urging them to stop starving the Palestinians and to pressure Israel to release the Palestinian prisoners, including the MP's and cabinet ministers, to end its occupation and apartheid, and to commit itself to a sustainable peace in the Middle East in which the Palestinians would be given back their basic rights including the inalienable right of return.

Please give it few minutes of your time

Together we can make the difference

See It Right! ... A call for help and reflection

2006-09-16T15:38:00.000+01:00

few days ago, my friend in Jordan sent me this full-of-determination letter written by the amazing Palestinian Samah.

To whom it may concern:
I am Samah Mahmoud Mohammed Ganem. I graduated from Jordan University as an English language and literature major in 1999.
For 2 years I have worked as a volunteer in one of the blind schools in Jordan. Working with blind kids along with my experience at the university motivated me to search for the best methods to teach blind kids not only to comprehend and master the language, but also to challenge their obstacle to do whatever they feel is right for them.
My further goal is to go on with my education in teaching English as a second language. Intention is to assist all blind students as well as teachers to acquire the best teaching and learning, techniques and methods, by going on with my education.
To be able to endeavor this aim in life, going on with education is essential, teachers similar to all majors need to update their methods especially in dealing with the most understanding generations. Teachers also are similar to doctors; they are specialized in the biological nature of their patients, while teachers deal with their patients’ minds, hearts and souls.
Being blind by birth as God has gently meant it for me gives me the role I would like to play over my life, to enlighten my blind sisters’ and brothers’ visions. It is the challenge to change people watching all those with special needs prospective in how to look at them.
Unable to see physically right, however we have an open mind willing to understand and comprehend the environment around.
Going on with my education is not an easy task; on my side I turn to your help and support. Please do share and offer your light to the dark city. One candle can spread the light farther to millions if given in honest support.
You are my wings beyond the wind.
In your offers I will have the power to improve for the best, I need to be stronger to aid my community; I would like to be one of the best soldiers to serve the best nation.

I can tell you with all confidence, Samah wrote these words herself. She wrote them not only to seek help, a very legitimate reason itself for someone with such a dream and determination, but also to teach all of us how to have a dream and live for it, how to look at the full half of the glass instead of the empty one, how to "see" this world full of opportunities and hope rather than seeing it full of evil, darkness and hatred and more importantly to teach us that while "we" keep blaming our fate for joys that we miss there are other humans very satisfied with their lives although they miss some joys that are very essential and vital for us that we cannot even imagine ourselves living without them.

You may be probably asking yourself now: but what can I do? Whoever and wherever you are you can do a lot for Samah. If you work or study in an academic institution you can knock the doors there with Samah's letter in your hand. There should be someone there who would be good enough to offer her a scholarship. If you work in a company approach those in charge and see if they can offer any help. If you have a friend or relative who is rich enough to sponsor a postgraduate student get in touch with them and translate Samah's dream into reality. Don't feel shy or embarrassed; you are not begging anyone for money, you are not doing it for yourself but rather for a good a noble cause. And if non of these apply to you remember that you always have something that you can do right now, spread the word!

If you think you can help or if you need more information please contact Tuleen Abu Shmais on her email

tshmais@gmail.com.

I Found a Treasure!

2006-09-15T01:03:00.000+01:00

Last week I received several notices about Forced Migration Review's (FMR) most recent edition on Palestinian refugees. I never had the chance to have a look at it before today when I took a break to check that journal for the first time. It is a masterwork! One of the most comprehensive publication I've ever seen in my whole life tackling different aspects of the Palestinian refugees and their continuous suffering. 50+ pages out of a total of 71 pages are dedicated for this topic with 29 articles discussing a broad range of relevant issues including history, politics, occupation, health, refugee camps, house demolishings, civil society and so on. It is a must-read journal for everyone looking to educate themselves on the Palestinian cause in general, and on Palestinian refugees in particular.

Yet don't get me wrong. This is NOT the treasure I'm talking about. Browsing FMR's website, I got redirected to the publisher's online portal "Forced Migration Online"; Now this is the real gold mine. This portal is a world of information on human displacement of which Palestinian refugees is just one example.

Go to the first section "Regional resources" >> "Research Guides" and you will find five different and very detailed research guides on Palestinian refugees in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Go to "Thematic Resources" >> "Resource Summaries" and select "Palestinians", you'll get a list of resources under the theme "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" including documents, websites and relevant organisations.

Go to the "Digital Library" and search for the word "Palestinian" and you will get 1038 results which include all work and research papers related to the Palestinian refugees that you might have ever heard or thought about.

Go to "Web Catalogue" and search for the word "Palestinian" and you will get a plenty of selected web-based resources related to the Palestinian refugees. You can also suggest any other resources that you may know.

Go to "Organisations" and search for the word "Palestinian" and you find a comprehensive list of organisations whose activities are relevant to the Palestinian refugees.

Go to "Handbooks and guidelines" and you'll find very useful documents related to the refugees in general.

Go to "Working Papers" and you'll get a number of excellent working papers prepared by the Refugees Studies Centre, the publisher of both "Forced Migration Online" and "Forced Migration Review". A number of these are on the Palestinian refugees.

Isn't this a real treasure?!

Israel is Behind 9/11; What a Surprise!

2006-09-13T13:25:00.000+01:00

I haven't written on 9/11 before. After five years of reading, listening and watching the analysis of what actually happened that day and the sequence of event preceding and following it, it was not a difficult job for me to come with the conclusion that if it was Al-Qaida who carried out the 9/11 bombings, I am definite that they were not the only puppeteers in the scene whether they knew it or not. I cannot say that I was addicted to research on 9/11, but the more I read the cleared the overall picture becomes to me.

What is of interest for me today is that I have no doubt now, what soever, that the Israeli knew from the beginning about the plot and I won't be surprised at all to learn that they indirectly facilitated or affected the progress of the plot to achieve their evil goals. I'm not going to start explaining what I believe to be a conspiracy behind 9/11 as this will take piles or writings. But considering the testimonies of the eyewitnesses in the three locations targeted I can say that what might actually happened was that the Zionists knew the WTC was going to be one of the targets; They also knew that the construction was durable enough to tolerate airplane clashes. Yet for them to get the most out of the day they decided that the whole building must collapse and therefor they implanted explosives in the building (all scientific analyses proved that what happened to the WTC could never occur without a controlled demolition).

What about the attack on the Pentagon? All witnesses can tell you that there was no airplane at all, not even parts of that plane. All what could be found were few parts of a small single-engine plane, something like a glider. But hold on, isn't this too much to believe? Not at all, especially if we come to know that this dirty trick was thought of long time ago to gain the support of the US public opinion to bring down the governing regime in Cuba. The CIA's plan was to get one airplane with CIA agents to take off as if it is heading to Cuba in a normal trip then to change the direction of the flight and get another unmanned plane to fly to explode in Cuba so that they could make it look like as if it was the Cubans who attacked the airplane and hence give themselves the excuse to retaliate and declare war on Cuba. What about the passengers on flight 77? Well, They could have been taken somewhere else and killed there, or probably most of those on that flight were CIA agents who killed the hijackers and everyone else and hid the airplane somewhere (there are many places on this planet that are still black boxes for normal people like us).

So, so far the Zionists intended to destroy the WTC and they did, for some reason (probably obvious for some people) they didn't want the Pentagon to be severely effected, yet they didn't want to miss the chance of heating more Americans when the symbol of their military power get attacked, so they replaced the Boeing 757 with a single-engine craft. What about flight 93? This is the big secret, I'm really very curious to know where it was heading to. The White House probably? Whatever the target was it seemed to be a very sensitive target that the Zionists did not even want to give it the chance to be touched, and therefor flight 93 faced the same destiny of flight 77 with the exception that it wasn't replaced with another plane but rather with a made-up explosion on ground. For the first time in history a jet airplane just evaporates!

Probably you won't believe that Israel knew about it and monitored the plot until it happened. Paul Thomson built a Complete timeline of all events and incidents related to 9/11. With a simple search for the word "Israel" in the timetable, I got the following:

September 1, 1992: US Misses Opportunity to Stop First WTC Bombing and Discover al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda Operatives Ahmad Ajaj and Ramzi Yousef enter the US together. Ajaj is arrested at Kennedy Airport in New York City. Yousef is not arrested, and later, he masterminds the 1993 bombing of the WTC. “The US government was pretty sure Ajaj was a terrorist from the moment he stepped foot on US soil,” because his “suitcases were stuffed with fake passports, fake IDs and a cheat sheet on how to lie to US immigration inspectors,” plus “two handwritten notebooks filled with bomb recipes, six bomb-making manuals, four how-to videotapes concerning weaponry, and an advanced guide to surveillance training.” However, Ajaj is charged only with passport fraud, and serves a six-month sentence. From prison, Ajaj frequently calls Yousef and others in the 1993 WTC bombing plot, but no one translates the calls until long after the bombing. [Los Angeles Times, 10/14/2001] Ajaj is released from prison three days after the WTC bombing, but is later rearrested and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. [Los Angeles Times, 10/14/2001] One of the manuals seized from Ajaj is horribly mistranslated for the trial. For instance, the title page is said to say “The Basic Rule,” published in Jordan in 1982, when in fact the title says “al-Qaeda” (which means “the base” in English), published in Afghanistan in 1989. Investigators later complain that a proper translation could have shown an early connection between al-Qaeda and the WTC bombing. [New York Times, 1/14/2001] An Israeli Newsweekly later reports that the Palestinian Ajaj may have been a mole for the Israeli Mossad. The Village Voice has suggested that Ajaj may have had “advance knowledge of the World Trade Center bombing, which he shared with Mossad, and that Mossad, for whatever reason, kept the secret to itself.” Ajaj was not just knowledgeable, but was involved in the planning of the bombing from his prison cell. [Village Voice, 8/3/1993]
Entity Tags: Ahmad Ajaj, al-Qaeda, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Ramzi Yousef, World Trade Center
1996: Mossad Supposedly Plans to Kill Bin Laden
Israeli spy agency Mossad supposedly plots to kill Osama bin Laden. According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth, it recruits a female confidante of his and assigns her the mission of killing him. Mossad has been trailing bin Laden while assisting the US and Egypt in investigating a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (see June 1995). But the plan is aborted due to tensions between Israel and the woman’s country. [Associated Press, 1/27/2006]
Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
January 2000: Israeli Spy Ring Begins Penetrating US
A DEA government document later leaked to the press [Drug Enforcement Agency, 6/2001] suggests that a large Israeli spy ring starts penetrating the US from at least this time, if not earlier. This ring, which will later become popularly known as the “art student spy ring,” is later shown to have strange connections to the events of 9/11. [Insight, 3/11/2002]
Entity Tags: "Israeli art students", Drug Enforcement Agency, United States
February 6, 2000: Apparent Mossad Attempt to Infiltrate al-Qaeda Thwarted
India’s largest Newsweekly reports that it appears a recent Mossad attempt to infiltrate al-Qaeda failed when undercover agents were stopped on their way to Bangladesh by Indian customs officials. These 11 men appeared to be from Afghanistan, but had Israeli passports. One expert states, “It is not unlikely for Mossad to recruit 11 Afghans in Iran and grant them Israeli citizenship to penetrate a network such as bin Laden’s. They would begin by infiltrating them into an Islamic radical group in an unlikely place like Bangladesh.” [Week, 2/6/2000]
Entity Tags: Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, al-Qaeda
April 19, 2000: Reports Indicate Israeli Organized Crime Units Dominate Ecstasy Distribution
USA Today reports that “Israeli crime groups ... dominate distribution” of Ecstasy. [USA Today, 4/19/2000] The DEA also states that most of the Ecstasy sold in the US is “controlled by organized crime figures in Western Europe, Russia, and Israel.” [United Press International, 10/25/2001] According to DEA documents, the Israeli “art student spy ring” “has been linked to several ongoing DEA [Ecstasy] investigations in Florida, California, Texas, and New York now being closely coordinated by DEA headquarters.” [Insight, 3/11/2002]
Entity Tags: "Israeli art students", Drug Enforcement Agency
December 2000-April 2001: Israeli Investigators Deported After Identifying Two Hijackers
According to later German reports, “a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, [follow] the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. ... In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they [identify] ... Atta and Marwan Alshehhi as possible terrorists. Agents [live] in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock.” Supposedly, around April, the Israeli agents are discovered and deported, terminating the investigation. [Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 10/1/2002]
Entity Tags: Marwan Alshehhi, Mohamed Atta, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
March 23, 2001: DEA Issues Alert to Look Out for Israeli Spies
The Office of National Drug Control Policy issues a National Security Alert describing “apparent attempts by Israeli nationals to learn about government personnel and office layouts.” This later becomes known through a leaked DEA document called “Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities.” A crackdown ensues and by June, around 120 Israelis are apprehended. More are apprehended later. [Drug Enforcement Agency, 6/2001]
Entity Tags: "Israeli art students", Office of National Drug Control Policy
Summer 2001: Israel Warns US of ‘Big Attack’
The Associated Press will report in May 2002, “Israeli intelligence services were aware several months before Sept. 11 that bin Laden was planning a large-scale terror attack but did not know what his targets would be, Israeli officials have said. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, tells the Associated Press shortly after the attacks that ‘everybody knew about a heightened alert and knew that bin Laden was preparing a big attack.’ He said information was passed on to Washington but denied Israel had any concrete intelligence that could have been used to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.” [Associated Press, 5/19/2002] The claim that Israel lacks concrete intelligence is contradicted by other media reports (see August 8-15, 2001) (see August 23, 2001) (see September 4, 2001).
Entity Tags: Israel, Osama bin Laden, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
June 2001: DEA Draws Up Report on Israeli Spies
The DEA’s Office of Security Programs prepares a 60-page internal memo on the Israeli “art student spy ring.” [Drug Enforcement Agency, 6/2001] The Memo is a compilation of dozens of field reports, and was meant only for the eyes of senior officials at the Justice Department (of which the DEA is adjunct), but it is leaked to the press around December 2001. The report connects the spies to efforts to foil investigations into Israeli organized crime activity involving the importation of the drug Ecstasy. The spies also appear to be snooping on top-secret military bases. For instance, on April 30, 2001, an Air Force alert was issued from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City concerning “possible intelligence collection being conducted by Israeli art students.” Tinker AFB houses AWACS surveillance craft and Stealth bombers. By the time of the report, the US has “apprehended or expelled close to 120 Israeli nationals” but many remain at large. [Le Monde (Paris), 3/5/2002; Salon, 5/7/2002] An additional 20 or so Israeli spies are apprehended between June and 9/11. [Fox News, 12/12/2001]
Entity Tags: Office of Security Programs, "Israeli art students", US Department of Justice
August 8-15, 2001: Israel Reportedly Warns of Major Assault on the US
At some point between these dates, Israel warns the US that an al-Qaeda attack is imminent. [Fox News, 5/17/2002] Reportedly, two high-ranking agents from the Mossad come to Washington and warn the FBI and CIA that from 50 to 200 terrorists have slipped into the US and are planning “a major assault on the United States.” They say indications point to a “large scale target,” and that Americans would be “very vulnerable.” They add there could be Iraqi connections to the al-Qaeda attack. [Daily Telegraph, 9/16/2001; Los Angeles Times, 9/20/2001; Ottawa Citizen, 9/17/2001] The Los Angeles Times later retracts its story after a CIA spokesperson says, “There was no such warning. Allegations that there was are complete and utter nonsense.” [Los Angeles Times, 9/21/2001] Other newspapers do not retract it.
Entity Tags: al-Qaeda, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
August 23, 2001: Mossad Reportedly Gives CIA List of Terrorist Living in US; at Least Four 9/11 Hijackers Named
According to German newspapers, the Mossad gives the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and say that they appear to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. It is unknown if these are the 19 9/11 hijackers or if the number is a coincidence. However, four names on the list are known, and these four will be 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta. [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002; Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 10/1/2002; BBC, 10/2/2002; Ha'aretz, 10/3/2002] The Mossad appears to have learned about this through its “art student spy ring.” Yet apparently, this warning and list are not treated as particularly urgent by the CIA and the information is not passed on to the FBI. It is unclear whether this warning influenced the decision to add Alhazmi and Almihdhar to a terrorism watch list on this same day, and if so, why only those two. [Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 10/1/2002] Israel has denied that there were any Mossad agents in the US. [Ha'aretz, 10/3/2002]
Entity Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Israeli art students", Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, Mohamed Atta
September 4, 2001: Mossad Gives Another Warning of Major, Imminent Attack
“On or around” this day, the Mossad give their “latest” warning to the US of a major, imminent attack by al-Qaeda, according to sources close to Mossad. One former Mossad agent says, “My understanding is that the warning was not specific. No target was identified. But it should have resulted in an increased state of security.” US intelligence claims this never happened. [Sunday Mail, 9/16/2001]
Entity Tags: United States, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
September 4, 2001: Israeli Company Moves Out of WTC
The Zim-American Israeli Shipping Co. moves their North American headquarters from the 16th floor of the WTC to Norfolk, Virginia, one week before the 9/11 attacks. The Israeli government owns 49 percent of the company. [Virginian-Pilot, 9/4/2001] Zim announced the move and its date six months earlier. [Virginian-Pilot, 4/3/2001] More than 200 workers had just been moved out; about ten are still in the building making final moving arrangements on 9/11, but escape. [Jerusalem Post, 9/13/2001; Journal of Commerce, 10/18/2001] The move leaves only one Israeli company, ClearForest, with 18 employees, in the WTC on 9/11. The four or five employees in the building at the time manage to escape. [Jerusalem Post, 9/13/2001] One year later, a Zim ship is impounded while attempting to ship Israeli military equipment to Iran; it is speculated that this is done with the knowledge of Israel. [Agence France-Presse, 3/29/2002]
Entity Tags: Zim-American Israeli Shipping Co., World Trade Center, ClearForest
September 11, 2001: Two Hours Before Attacks, Israeli Company Employees Receive Warnings
Odigo's logo. [Source: Odigo]

Two employees of Odigo, Inc., an Israeli company, receive warnings of an imminent attack in New York City about two hours before the first plane hits the WTC. Odigo, one of the world’s largest instant messaging companies, has its headquarters two blocks from the WTC. The Odigo Research and Development offices where the warnings were received are located in Herzliyya, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Israeli security and the FBI were notified immediately after the 9/11 attacks began. The two employees claim not to know who sent the warnings. “Odigo service includes a feature called People Finder that allows users to seek out and contact others based on certain interests or demographics. [Alex] Diamandis [Odigo vice president of sales and marketing] said it was possible that the attack warning was broadcast to other Odigo members, but the company has not received reports of other recipients of the message.” [Ha'aretz, 9/26/2001; Washington Post, 9/27/2001] Odigo claims the warning did not specifically mention the WTC, but the company refuses to divulge what was specified, claiming, “Providing more details would only lead to more conjecture.” [Washington Post, 9/28/2001] However, a later newspaper report claims that the message declared “that some sort of attack was about to take place. The notes ended with an anti-Semitic slur. ‘The messages said something big was going to happen in a certain amount of time, and it did—almost to the minute,’ said Alex Diamandis, vice president of sales for the high-tech company... He said the employees did not know the person who sent the message, but they traced it to a computer address and have given that information to the FBI.” [Washington Post, 10/4/2001] Odigo gave the FBI the Internet address of the message’s sender so the name of the sender could be found. [Deutsche Presse-Agentur (Hamburg), 9/26/2001] Two months later, it is reported that the FBI is still investigating the matter, but there have been no reports since. [Courier Mail, 11/20/2001]
Entity Tags: Odigo Inc., World Trade Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Israel
September 11, 2001: The 9/11 Attack: 3,000 Die in New York City and Washington, D.C.
The September 11, 2001 attacks. From left to right: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Flight 93 crash. [Source: unknown]

The 9/11 attack: Four planes are hijacked, two crash into the WTC, one into the Pentagon, and one crashes into the Pennsylvania countryside. Nearly 3,000 people are killed.
Entity Tags: World Trade Center, Pentagon, al-Qaeda, United Airlines, American Airlines
September 11, 2001: Israeli Special-Ops Passenger Shot or Stabbed by Hijackers?
An FAA memo written on the evening of 9/11, and later leaked, suggests that a man on Flight 11 was shot and killed by a gun before the plane crashed into the WTC. The “Executive Summary,” based on information relayed by a flight attendant to the American Airlines Operation Center, stated “that a passenger located in seat 10B [Satam Al Suqami] shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B [Daniel Lewin] at 9:20 am.” (Note that since Flight 11 crashed at 8:46, the time must be a typo, probably meaning 8:20). A report in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on September 17 identifies Lewin as a former member of the Israel Defense Force Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most successful special-operations unit. [United Press International, 3/6/2002] Sayeret Matkal is a deep-penetration unit that has been involved in assassinations, the theft of foreign signals-intelligence materials, and the theft and destruction of foreign nuclear weaponry. Sayeret Matkal is best known for the 1976 rescue of 106 passengers at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. [New Yorker, 10/29/2001] Lewin founded Akamai, a successful computer company, and his connections to Sayeret Matkal remained hidden until the gun story became known. [Guardian, 9/15/2001] FAA and American Airline officials later deny the gun story and suggest that Lewin was probably stabbed to death instead. [United Press International, 3/6/2002; Washington Post, 3/2/2002] Officials assert that the leaked document was a “first draft,” and subsequently corrected, but declines to release the final draft, calling it “protected information.” However, an FAA official present when the memo was drafted will dispute the FAA’s claim, asserting that “[t]he document was reviewed for accuracy by a number of people in the room, including myself and a couple of managers of the operations center.” [WorldNetDaily, 3/7/2002]
Entity Tags: Daniel Lewin, Federal Aviation Administration, Satam Al Suqami, American Airlines, Sayeret Matkal
September 11, 2001: Former Israeli Prime Minister: 9/11 Very Good for Israeli-US Relations
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when asked what the 9/11 attacks means for relations between the US and Israel, replies, “It’s very good.” Then he edits himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” [New York Times, 9/12/2001] A week later, the Village Voice states, “From national networks to small-town newspapers, the view that America’s terrible taste of terrorism will finally do away with even modest calls for the restraint of Israel’s military attacks on Palestinian towns has become an instant, unshakable axiom. ... Now, support for Israel in America is officially absolute, and Palestinians are cast once again as players in a global terrorist conspiracy.” [Village Voice, 9/19/2001]
Entity Tags: Israel, Palestinians, United States, Benjamin Netanyahu
September 11, 2001: Five Israelis Arrested for Puzzling Behavior near WTC
Five Israelis are arrested around 4:30 pm for “puzzling behavior” related to the WTC attacks: filming the burning WTC from the roof of their company’s building near Liberty State Park, New Jersey, then shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery. A neighbor spotted them and called the police and the FBI. The police tracked them down in a van with the words “Urban Moving Systems” written on the side. [Bergen Record, 9/12/2001; Ha'aretz, 9/17/2001] One man was found with $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock, another had two passports on him, and a box cutter was found in the van. [ABC News, 6/21/2002] Investigators say that “[t]here are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted... It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen.” [Bergen Record, 9/12/2001] One of these Israelis later says, “our purpose was to document the event.” [ABC News, 6/21/2002] The FBI later concludes at least two are Mossad agents and that all were on a Mossad surveillance mission. The FBI interrogates them for weeks. [Forward, 3/15/2002] They are held on immigration violation charges, but are released 71 days later. [ABC News, 6/21/2002] Their names are later identified as Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, and Yaron Shmuel. [Forward, 3/15/2002]
Entity Tags: World Trade Center, Paul Kurzberg, Omer Marmari, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shmuel, Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Federal Bureau of Investigation
September 14, 2001: Head of Shadowy Company Flees US
Dominick Suter, owner of the company Urban Moving Systems, flees the country to Israel. The FBI later tells ABC News, “Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.” Suter has been tied to the five Israeli agents caught filming the WTC attack. The FBI had questioned Suter around September 12, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. However, when the FBI returns a few days later, he is gone. [Forward, 3/15/2002; New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety, 12/13/2001; ABC News, 6/21/2002]
Entity Tags: Dominick Suter, Federal Bureau of Investigation
September 29-30, 2001: Suspected Mossad Agents Detained, Released
Police in the Midwest stop six men carrying suspicious documents. They possess photos and descriptions of a nuclear power plant in Florida and the Trans-Alaska pipeline, and have “box cutters and other equipment.” All six have Israeli passports. They are released the same day after their passports are shown to be valid, but before anyone interviews them. The FBI is reportedly furious about their release. [Miami Herald, 10/3/2001; Knight Ridder, 10/31/2001; London Times, 11/2/2001] The six men may have been Mossad agents. In addition to snooping on the DEA and Islamic militants, some Mossad agents in the “art student spy ring” have been caught trying to break into military bases and other top-secret facilities (see March 23, 2001). [Salon, 5/7/2002]
Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation
October 10, 2001: Two Israelis Are Detained in Mexican Legislature Building after Behaving Suspiciously and Found To Be Carrying Arms
Two Israelis, Salvador Gersson Smike, 34, and Sar Ben Zui, 27, are arrested in the Mexican Congress Building in Mexico City. Smike is carrying a plastic 9 mm sophisticated Glock 9 mm pistol tucked into his underwear in his lower back. Glock pistols are made with a special plastic material and are very easy to smuggle. [Correo, 10/11/2001; El Heraldo de Mexico (Mexico City), 10/11/2001; Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City), 10/12/2001] He also has with him a briefcase reported to contain 58 bullets, bomb-making materials, three detonators, and nine grenades. [El Heraldo de Mexico (Mexico City), 10/11/2001] The two were apprehended after ex-sugarcane workers, who were waiting for a congressional hearing, saw the two Israelis behaving strangely at around 4:00 p.m. They were reportedly photographing the workers below the belt. When the workers demanded that the two men identify themselves, the Israelis said they were press photographers. The workers dismissed their claims, overcame them, and then discovered they were armed with pistols and other high caliber arms. The two men had apparently also been seen the day before taking pictures. [Cronica de Hoy (Mexico City), 10/12/2001] Security guards soon arrived, disarmed the men, and took them to the security office. At around 6:00 p.m., it is learned that the two men are Israelis and that one of them, Salvador Gersson, is a former colonel of the Israeli Special Forces. [Correo, 10/11/2001; Diario de Mexico (Mexico City), 10/11/2001 ] Soon after, a man claiming to be a supervisor from the company, Desarrollo de Sistemas de Seguridad Privada (Private Security Systems Development), says the two men are employees at the firm and that they were taking pictures because they are “vacationing.” The journalists who are present scoff at the claim. [Correo, 10/11/2001; El Heraldo de Mexico (Mexico City), 10/11/2001] After October 13, no additional information is reported about the incident.
Entity Tags: Salvador Gersson Smike, Sar Ben Zui, Private Security Systems Development
October 16, 2001: Several Arrested for Curious Sears Tower Surveillance
Two men, Moshe Elmakias and Ron Katar, are arrested after being found with a detailed video of the Sears Tower in Chicago. In addition, a woman named Ayelet Reisler is found with them, carrying conflicting identification information. They are arrested for illegal dumping, using a van with the name Moving Systems Incorporated. The video contains extensive zoom in shots of the Sears Tower; it is not known when the video was filmed. [Mercury (Philadelphia), 10/17/2001]
Entity Tags: Ayelet Reisler, Sears Tower, Ron Katar, Moshe Elmakias
November 20, 2001: Israelis Who Videotaped WTC Attack Are Released, Deported
The five Israelis arrested on 9/11 for videotaping the WTC attack and then cheering about it (see September 11, 2001) are released and deported to Israel. Some of the men’s names had appeared in a US national intelligence database, and the FBI has concluded that at least two of the men were working for the Mossad, according to ABC News. However, the FBI says that none of the Israelis had any advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and they were released as part of a deal between the US and the Israeli government. After their release, they claim to have been tortured. [Forward, 3/15/2002; ABC News, 6/21/2002]
Entity Tags: Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Omer Marmari, Oded Ellner, Israel, Federal Bureau of Investigation
November 23, 2001: More Israelis Arrested in Wake of 9/11
The Washington Post reports that “[a]t least 60 young Israeli Jews have been arrested and detained around the country on immigration charges since the September 11 attacks, many of them held on US government officials’ invocation of national security.” An INS official who requested anonymity says the use of the term “special interest” for Israelis being held in Cleveland, St. Louis, and other places means the case in question is “related to the investigation of September 11th.” [Washington Post, 11/23/2001] Most of them are deported. However, Intelligence Online claims that “For the overwhelming majority of the ring’s members expelled, there was no problem at all with visas, and in the lists we only found a few minor cases of expired visas."” [Agence France-Presse, 3/6/2002]
Entity Tags: Immigration and Naturalization Service
December 12-15, 2001: News Reports Raises Israeli Spying Questions
Fox News reports, “Investigators within the DEA, INS, and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying ... is considered career suicide.” “A highly placed investigator says there are ‘tie-ins’ between the spy ring and 9/11. However, when asked for details, he flatly refuses to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’” The report also reveals that Amdocs, an Israeli company, is recording virtually every phone call in the US and could be passing information on to the Israeli government (similar claims were first raised in 2000 [Insight, 5/29/2000] ). Fox News suggests that the position of this company might impede the 9/11 investigation. [Fox News, 12/12/2001]
Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Israel, Amdocs
December 16, 2001: Fox News Removes Controversial Story from Website, but Story Nonetheless Makes an Impact
Fox News removes its series on the “art student spy ring” from its website after only two days, in response to pressure from The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and others. CAMERA suggests the reporter “has something, personally, about Israel. ... Maybe he’s very sympathetic to the Arab side.” [Salon, 5/7/2002] The head of the ADL calls the report “sinister dangerous innuendo which fuels anti-Semitism.” [Forward, 12/21/2001] Yet there does not appear to be any substance to these personal attacks (and Forward later reverses its stance on the spy ring (see March 15, 2002)). Fox News also never makes a formal repudiation or correction about the series. The contents of the series continues to be generally ignored by the mainstream media, but it makes a big impact inside the US government: An internal DEA communiqué from December 18 mentions the Fox report by name, and warns of security breaches in telecommunications as described in the Fox report. [Salon, 5/7/2002]
Entity Tags: "Israeli art students", Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Drug Enforcement Agency, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Fox News
March 5, 2002: Israeli Spies Reportedly Tracked 9/11 Hijackers
It is reported that many spies in the uncovered Israeli spy ring seemed to have been trailing the 9/11 hijackers. At the very least, they were in close proximity. For instance, five Israeli spies are intercepted in the tiny town of Hollywood, Florida, and four 9/11 hijackers are known to have spent time in Hollywood, Florida. [Le Monde (Paris), 3/5/2002; Reuters, 3/5/2002; Jane's Intelligence Digest, 3/15/2002] In one case, some Israeli spies lived at 4220 Sheridan Street, only a few hundred feet from where Mohamed Atta was living at 3389 Sheridan Street. Israeli spies appear to have been close to at least ten of the 19 9/11 hijackers. [Salon, 5/7/2002]
Entity Tags: Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Mohamed Atta
March 6, 2002: US Officials Deny and Media Downplay Existence of Israeli Spy Ring
A Washington Post article, relying on US officials, denies the existence of any Israeli spy ring. A “wide array of US officials” supposedly deny it, and Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden says: “This seems to be an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage.” [Washington Post, 3/6/2002] The New York Times fails to cover the story at all, even months later. [Salon, 5/7/2002] By mid-March, Jane’s Intelligence Digest, the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, notes: “It is rather strange that the US media seems to be ignoring what may well be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks—the alleged breakup of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA.” [Jane's Intelligence Digest, 3/15/2002]
Entity Tags: US Department of Justice, Susan Dryden, "Israeli art students"
March 11, 2002: Suspected Israeli Students Reportedly Served in Military
A newspaper reports that the DEA study on Israeli “art students” determined the “students” all had “recently served in the Israeli military, the majority in intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units.” [Palm Beach Post, 3/11/2002]
Entity Tags: Drug Enforcement Agency, "Israeli art students"
March 15, 2002: Jewish Magazine Says Israelis Spied in US on Radical Muslims
Forward, a US publication with a large Jewish audience, admits that there has been an Israeli spy ring in the US. [Forward, 3/15/2002] This is a reversal of their earlier stance. [Forward, 12/21/2001] But, “far from pointing to Israeli spying against US government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.” [Forward, 3/15/2002]
Entity Tags: "Israeli art students"
May 7, 2002: Explosives Detected on Illegal Israelis
A moving truck is pulled over for speeding in the middle of the night in Oak Harbor, Washington, near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. The base is the home of the advanced electronic warfare Prowler jets. A bomb-sniffing dog detects explosives on one of the men and inside the truck. High-tech equipment is then used to confirm the presence of TNT on the gearshift and RDX plastic explosive on the steering wheel. Both men turn out to be Israeli (one with an altered passport) and in the country illegally. [Fox News, 5/13/2002] However, the FBI later clears the two men, saying both the dog and the tests just detected false positives from “residue left by a cigarette lighter.” [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5/14/2002; Jerusalem Post, 5/14/2002] The “art student spy ring” frequently uses moving vans as cover, and has been caught spying on the most top secret military bases. [Salon, 5/7/2002] In a possibly related story, the Seattle FBI office that handled this case will be broken into a few weeks later, and even a room containing evidence will be penetrated. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 7/29/2002]
Entity Tags: "Oak Harbor Israelis", Federal Bureau of Investigation
May 7, 2002: Sloppy Israeli Spy Ring Could Have Been Smoke Screen
Salon reports on the Israeli “art student spy ring.” All the “students” claim to have come from either Bezalel Academy or the University of Jerusalem. A look in the Bezalel database shows that not a single “art student” appears to have attended school there. There is no such thing as the University of Jerusalem. In fact, the article points out that the sheer sloppiness and brazenness of the spy operation appears to be a great mystery, especially since the Mossad is renowned as one of the best spy agencies in the world. One government source suggests a theory to Salon that the “art students” were actually a smoke screen. They were meant to be caught and connected to DEA surveillance so that a smaller number of spies also posing as art students could complete other missions. One such mission could have been the monitoring of al-Qaeda operatives. [Salon, 5/7/2002] Shortly afterwards, a major Israeli newspaper publishes a story about the spy ring, but does not come to any conclusions. [Ha'aretz, 5/14/2002]
Entity Tags: "Israeli art students", Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Drug Enforcement Agency, al-Qaeda
November 2002: Saudi Interior Minister Blames Jews for 9/11 Attacks
Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef blames Zionists and Jews for the 9/11 attacks. He tells journalists, “Who has benefited from September 11 attacks? I think [the Jews] were the protagonists of such attacks.” Nayef is in charge of the Saudi investigation into the attacks, and some US congresspeople respond to the comments by questioning how strongly Saudi Arabia is investigating the involvement of the 15 Saudi 9/11 hijackers. [Associated Press, 12/5/2002]
Entity Tags: Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, Israel
May 2004: More Israelis Are Arrested in Suspicious Circumstances, Again Traveling in Moving Vans
On May 9, two Israelis are arrested after a high-speed chase in Tennessee. They are found with false documents. [WCYB 5 (Bristol, Va), 5/9/2004] On May 27, two others are arrested after trying to enter an Atlanta military base. Explosives are possibly discovered in their van. [Kings Bay Periscope, 5/27/2004]
September 16, 2004: Israelis Arrested on 9/11 Sue the US, Claiming Mistreatment and Torture
Four of the five Israelis arrested on 9/11 (see September 11, 2001), Paul and Sylvian Kurcheil, Omer Marmari, and Vyron Shmuel, file a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the US Justice Department. They claim they were arrested illegally, then held without charge and interrogated and tortured for months. Their lawyer claims the case will serve as a venue to debunk theories that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks. [Ha'aretz, 9/16/2004; Jerusalem Post, 9/16/2004] Forward, a publication geared towards the Jewish population in the US, reported in 2002 that the FBI concluded at least two of the five were Mossad agents and that all were on a Mossad surveillance mission. [Forward, 3/15/2002]
Entity Tags: Omer Marmari, Vyron Shmuel, Paul Kurcheil, Sylvian Kurcheil, "Israeli art students", Israel Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, Federal Bureau of Investigation
September 16, 2004: New Israeli Art Student Ring in Canada Has Unexplained Link to Islamic Fundamentalist Fundraising
In a curious echo of reports of an Israeli “art student spy ring” in the US before 9/11, it is reported that numerous young Israelis claiming to be from non-existent art schools in Israel are being arrested and deported for selling art in Canada. Unlike the earlier events in the US, there are no reports of government offices and workers being targeted. Rather, it appears to be a money making scam to sell cheap Asian art for vastly inflated prices in numerous Canadian cities. However, it is reported these Israelis “may be linked to a group fronting for Islamic fundamentalist fundraisers.” The nature and detail of the connection between the Israelis and Islamic fundamentalists is not explained in the newspaper accounts of this scam. [Ha'aretz, 9/16/2004; Jerusalem Post, 9/16/2004]

Oh, and by the way. Watch this:

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (4): Inside Dimona's Video

2006-09-11T03:24:00.000+01:00

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (1)

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (2)

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (3)

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (3): The Photos

2006-09-11T03:13:00.000+01:00

Some photos taken by Mordechai Vanunu from the "Israeli" Dimona nuclear reactor site (Source: http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu/photos.html).

Looking inside a glove box for tooling nuclear materials

Looking from outside into a glove box

Control panel

Looking inside a glove box at models of bomb components or containers for nuclear materials

Outside of glove box

Plutonium separation plant control room

Shielded viewing portal for observing nuclear reactions

Production model of nuclear weapons core

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (1)

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal (2)

The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal: Let's dig up the dirt! (2)

2006-09-11T02:05:00.000+01:00

As I promised in an earlier post, I'm posting the second news story based on Mordechai Vanunu's testimony and published in the Sunday Times on October 5th, 1986.

The Sunday Times
Insight: Inside Dimona, Israel's nuclear bomb factory

Date: October 5, 1986

EVERY day at 7am a fleet of 40 blue and white Volvo buses speeds down the desert highway that cuts through the Negev desert. Nine miles out from the town of Dimona, the buses turn right into a side road and pull up after half a mile at an army checkpoint. Soldiers make a cursory inspection of security passes and the buses are waved through. Two miles further into the desert, they stop at another Halt sign, where security is more severely enforced.

Here an electrified fence extends into the dusty scrubland of the Negev. It surrounds Israel's most secret establishment. The sand within the perimeter is raked by tractor to betray intruder's footprints to the infantry and helicopter patrols. Observation posts are mounted on the hilltops nearby. Missile batteries have orders to shoot down any aircraft that stray into the airspace above, as one Israeli pilot discovered to his cost in 1967.

Officially, Dimona is run by the Israeli Atomic Energy Authority to conduct experiments into nuclear power. Its official title is Kirya-le-Mehekar Gariny or KMG - the Negev Nuclear Research Centre. The world knows it as Dimona, long considered to be Israel's nuclear bomb factory.

Dimona is a palm and concrete oasis reached from the Beersheba to Sodom highway. The road is the closest anyone can get without a security pass. The handful of photographers who have evaded the patrols and succeeded in snatching a hazy shot from a speeding car charge exorbitant reproduction fees for their rare pictures.

The Volvo buses travel the route three times a day to service the 7.30am, 3.30pm and 11.30pm shifts. They carry 2,700 scientists, technicians and administrative staff. Secrecy demands that many people remain unaware of the duties performed within by even long-standing colleagues. The penalty for loose talk is 15 years imprisonment.

Once off the buses, the workforce disperses to various machons, which are self-contained production units.

There are 10 machons in all. Machon 1 is the nuclear reactor itself, a silver-domed building 60ft in diameter. Machon 4 is where radioactive waste is immersed in tar and packed in drums to be sunk in the desert. But only a handful - 150 workers in all - are ever allowed to pass through the doors of the real secret within Dimona - Machon 2.

Outwardly, it is a crudely built and windowless concrete building, two storeys high - 80ft by 200ft - an apparently little-used warehouse and office block. Two details suggest otherwise: the walls are thickened to withstand bombardment and there is an elevator tower on the roof which seems unnecessary for such a small building.

For three decades this innocuous slab of concrete has hidden Israel's secrets from prying satelites and foreign nuclear energy inspectors. Above ground level the entire site is precisely what the Israelis say it is: an experimental nuclear power station. Intelligence agencies, scientists and journalists have attempted for many years to prove otherwise. But all have fallen down on one key question: Where is the technology that can transform the peaceful atomic research into a bomb factory? Machon 2 provides the answer.

False walls on the first floor above ground hide the service lifts that take men and materials to six subterranean levels, where the components of nuclear weapons are produced and machined into warhead parts.

IT WAS to Machon 2 that Mordechai Vanunu was first assigned in 1977. He is a 31-year-old Moroccan Jew, born on October 13, 1954, in Marrakesh, where his parents ran a small shop. In 1963, amidst increasingly anti-Jewish feeling, the family emigrated to Israel and settled in Beersheba. After three years conscription in the Israeli army, reaching the rank of first sergeant in a unit of sappers on the Golan Heights, Vanunu entered Ramat Aviv University in Tel Aviv. But he failed two exams after the first year of his physics degree course and returned home.

In mid-summer of 1976, he saw advertisements for trainee technicians at Dimona and, by chance, met a friend who was already employed by KMG. Vanunu collected an application form from the KMG offices in Beersheba, near the bus station on the main road to Tel Aviv.

His first interview was with security. Vanunu was asked about criminal offences, drug or alcohol problems and his political affiliations. A month later he received a letter of acceptance.

He went on the KMG payroll in November, 1976, by coincidence the same month that 13 American senators on a fact-finding visit to Israel were refused entry to Dimona. Vanunu was not taken out to the desert complex straightaway. Instead he was sent back to school for a crash course in physics, chemistry, maths and English. He sailed through the initial entrance exam along with 39 of his 45 fellow candidates in January, 1977. In early February, Vanunu's intake boarded a Volvo bus for Dimona.

They were taken to a school on the site where their first duty was to sign the Israeli Official Secrets Act. Then he was given his security pass, number 9657-8, medically assessed to be fit and further schooled, under the auspices of a headmaster called Parahi, in elementary nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry with the emphasis on plutonium, uranium and radioactivity.

Vanunu was then given a further pass number, 320, for entry to Machon 2, and a locker (No. 3). The new intake were given 10 weeks to familiarise themselves with Machon 2. At the end of June, their initial training complete, they celebrated with a party.

There was one hiccup at this point. Vanunu was called up for a month's army-reserve duty with his engineer unit, but this seems to have been a mistake. When the nature of his job was discovered he was quickly released. Within seven days he was back in Machon 2, to be told that, after passing a final test, he would be working on the night shift, 11.30pm to 8am.

Vanunu satisfied a threeman examination board (an independent engineer, one of the Dimona school lecturers, and a specialist in handling radio-active materials). On August 7, 1977, he reported for his first full day's work as a menahil - a controller on the night shift. It was the start of a nine-year stint as a nuclear technician which was to take Vanunu throughout the labyrinthine Machon 2.

DIMONA was secretly built by France between 1957 and 1964. It was originally claimed to be a textiles plant by Israel. When, in 1960, an American U2 spyplane photographed it for the first time, the incoming president, John F Kennedy forced the then Isreli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to submit to regular inspections by US scientists to ensure that Dimona's true purpose remained peaceful nuclear research. Those visits gave Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B Johnson, sufficient assurance to publicly declare that Dimona really was a civilian reactor.

President de Gaulle added his reassurance, saying that France had stopped short of supplying the technology that could have transformed Dimona into a plant 'from which, one day, atomic weapons could emerge. '

But the official claims have never been accepted. It has long been suspected, but never publicly confirmed, that Israel has been using Dimona to produce materials for a simple atomic weapon. But the many speculative attempts to lift the curtain around Dimona have always foundered. Invariably based on the testimony of unidentified sources, they failed to explain how Israel obtains the fissile material needed for nuclear weapons.

Atomic bombs are made either from Uranium 235 or plutonium. But the production of Uranium 235 requires a huge gaseous diffusion plant or a large number of gas centrifuges. Plutonium, however, can be produced in a compact separation plant.

Plutonium is a by-product of the nuclear process, which in some types of reactor, like the one at Dimona, has to be separated from the uranium fuel rods after they have spent a period in the reactor core. In sophisticated weapons design, just 2 1/2 kilograms of plutonium is enough to build a bomb.

France has always insisted that it had stopped short of supplying Israel with plutonium separation technology, which is thought to be the preserve of the major nuclear powers: America, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and more recently China. So most experts concluded that Israel, through the expertise and innovation of its scientists, had managed to extract only small amounts of plutonium using less efficient processes.

Inspections ended in 1969 after American scientists complained of uncooperative Israeli authorities. But they never saw any evidence to suggest that Dimona housed the plutonium separation plant necessary to turn an ordinary research project into a significant atomic bomb factory.

At best, the CIA and the United Nations have concluded, Israel may have stockpiled enough plutonium in the past 22 years to build perhaps 10 but certainly no more than 20 primitive atomic bombs similar to the 20 kiloton device dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. That estimate is based on the greatest amount of plutonium that can possibly be extracted without the aid of sophisticated separation technology.The general view has been that, while Israel does have an atomic weapons programme, it is still of a rudimentary nature. Similar suspicions are harboured against several other nations, including Argentina, Pakistan, India and South Africa.

However, Mordechai Vanunu's testimony, which has been checked with leading nuclear experts on both sides of the Atlantic, shows that one of the world's worst kept secrets is, in fact, one of the best kept confidences of the century. Far from being a nuclear pigmy, the evidence is that Israel must now be regarded a major nuclear power, ranking sixth in the atomic league table, with a stockpile of at least 100 nuclear weapons and with the components and ability to build atomic, neutron or hydrogen bombs.

WHEN French construction workers first bulldozed the desert scrub in 1957, they began excavating a crater 80ft deep in the sand. In it they buried Machon 2, the six-level concrete bunker, which was topped off with the two innocuous floors above ground. The false walls were built to hide the service lifts to the subterranean floors from the American inspectors. When the shell was complete, French engineers and technicians installed the technology de Gaulle claimed to have denied Israel. Vanunu's older workmates at Dimona fondly related stories of the Frenchmen who worked alongside them.

The six underground floors of Machon 2 are divided into numbered production units. There is also a demonstration room where visiting VIPs, confined only to the prime minister, the defence minister and the military top brass, are briefed on Operation Hump. That is the codename, says Vanunu, that Israel has given its latest bomb design programme.

In this room are boxed models of atomic devices and a wall-mounted floor plan of Machon 2. Workers are generally free to roam the plant during the long, tedious shifts. Vanunu regularly escaped the constant rounds of canasta played by his workmates to see what was going on.

He worked in, or visited, 33 production units in Machon 2. Unit 10, a ground floor, drive-in delivery bay received the trucks carrying the 100 large and 40 smaller fuel rods from the reactor core. A crane lowers the rods in baskets down through Level One which is a service floor, through Level Two which mainly houses the control room for the plant, to Unit 11 on Level Three.

Here the uranium fuel rods containing the plutonium by-product are chemically stripped of their aluminum coating. When stripped the uranium weighs 650 kilograms and is immersed in nitric acid. This is heated to 109 degrees centigrade for 30 hours to dissolve the uranium.

At this point the uranium content is 450 grams per litre and is transferred through pipes by vacuum to Units 12 to 22, the main treatment centre. This is so big that it occupies a huge production hall rising from Level Four to Level Two. During this process the liquid is treated to remove radioactivity and a mix of solvent and water is added. It is at this point that the plutonium, which mixes with the water, is separated from the uranium, which mixes with the solvent. By the time the mixture is pumped out of the main treatment centre it contains 300 miligrams of plutonium per litre.

In Unit 31 the liquid is further concentrated to two grams per litre and sent to Unit 33, where it is piped into 20-litre tanks and heated with, among other chemicals, hydrogen peroxide for four hours. After an eight-hour cooling period it is mixed with other chemicals which cause the powder to gather in lumps. This is drained and dried, leaving a 'cake' of plutonium, which is baked in Unit 37.

The baking process concentrates the metal into a solid button weighing 130 grams. Nine buttons of plutonium were produced each week, 1.17 kilograms a week for the 34 weeks a year that the process ran (It shut down for four months for repairs and maintenance). The annual net result of this separation process is around 40 kilograms of plutonium a year, or nearly six times the most optimistic assessments of Israel's plutonium making capabilities.
In addition, further units were added between 1980-2, built and installed by the Israelis alongside the plutonium separation plant and monitored from the same control room. One of them, Unit 93 on Level Four, produces tritium. This is of immense significance, for it means Israel has the potential to produce thermonuclear weapons far more powerful than ordinary atomic bombs.

Sticks of lithium and aluminium radiated in the reactor produce the tritium as a by product. Heated in Unit 93 to 625 degrees centigrade, the sticks melt. Tritium is extracted.

In Unit 95, built alongside the three-storey main treatment plant in a disused lift shaft, lithium 6 was separated from commercially available lithium, producing 180 grams a day. Unit 98 is a deuterium production plant.

All of these components, plutonium, lithium 6, tritium and deuterium are taken to another section on Level Four code named MM2, or Metallurgy, Machon 2. It is here that the raw materials are machined into the components of nuclear bombs.

THE processes described above are a simplified precis of the detailed descriptions, flow rates, measures, temperatures and other scientific data that Vanunu, from his position in the control room and work in other units, was able to memorise over nine years and pass on to The Sunday Times Insight team, which in turn checked them out with nuclear scientists.

Vanunu never claimed to have seen a completed bomb and never claimed any special knowledge of precisely what the components were. He says the components were taken out of Dimona at regular intervals in a guarded fleet of trucks and hire cars to an unknown location in Haifa.

Our extensive debriefings of Vanunu, over a period of four weeks, produced estimates that Israel was producing 40 kilograms of plutonium a year, enough to make 10 bombs a year. During the period Vanunu worked there Israel therefore produced enough plutonium for 100 nuclear bombs of at least 20 kilotons, equivalent to the one dropped on Nagasaki. By using sophisticated designs requiring smaller amounts of plutonium, it could have produced enough to make 200 nuclear bombs.

Moreover, the production of lithium 6, tritium and deuterium means that Israel is producing the raw materials to make the components used to boost the yield of primitive atomic weapons to 10 times the 20 kiloton yield.

Two pictures in particular appear to show a lithium deuteride hemisphere which could be used in the construction of the most devastating weapon of all - the thermonuclear bomb - a weapon capable of yielding the equivalent explosive force of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT. In the chilling jargon of the nuclear bomb makers, Israel has moved beyond the ability to produce small 'suburb-busting' nuclear bombs to 'city-busters'.

THERE was one question that remained unanswered in Mordechai Vanunu's story. France built Israel a 26 megawatt reactor which can produce, at the outside, seven kilograms of plutonium a year. So how could Vanunu possibly report an annual amount of 40 kilograms?

His reference to 100 large and 40 small uranium fuel rods from the core and the subsequent amounts, in litres or grams produced in the separation processes, suggest a reactor of up to 150 megawatts - the right quantity to produce 40 kilograms a year.

Two events in the late 1960s explain the disparity. First, the Israel secret service, Mossad, masterminded the illegal acquisition of 200 tons of yellowcake - the raw material from which 123 tons of uranium fuel can be extracted - in late 1968 in an operation known as the Plumbat Affair.

Nobody has even been able to explain why Israel wanted so much. A 26 megawatt reactor requires only 20 tons of fuel a year. France had supplied the initial charge, Israel's own phosphate industry provided a further 10 tons a year and spent fuel was recycled to make new rods. So Dimona had more than enough uranium to fuel a 26 mw reactor.

A few months later Israel deliberately provoked the American scientists who inspected Dimona at intervals, harassing them to the point where they pulled out altogether. Since then no outside agency has been inside Dimona, thus leaving the Israelis free to upgrade their 26 megawatt core to 150 megawatts. British atomic energy scientists have confirmed that boosting Dimona's French reactor by a factor of five could have been achieved without rebuilding the reactor.

This is supported by evidence from France. Sources quoted in a recent book about French-Israeli nuclear co-operation said that the reactor built in the Negev had been far larger than admitted. THE sophistication and scale of Israel's nuclear weapons-making capabilities revealed by Insight makes it clear that Israel is now a major nuclear power. Its survival in the face of conventional defeat would seem assured, for no Arab nation could match its nuclear muscle.China has approximately 300 warheads, France 500 and Britain as many as 700. Both America and the USSR are in a class of their own with about 27,000 each. Israel's projected arsenal of 100-200 weapons may be dwarfed by comparison but it is enough to make it the sixth most powerful nation on earth.

Ten days ago the outgoing prime minister, Shimon Peres, attended a regular briefing of Israeli newspaper editors. On the agenda was the upcoming Sunday Times Insight investigation.

Though no editor will publicly reveal details of the conversation, it is believed that Peres, having told the editors of the forthcoming report, warned them of their obligations under the Official Secrets Act. He admitted that Insight had gained access to an inside source.

A third news story will follow soon revealing how nuclear weapons experts from all around the world were convinced to work for the Zionists.

This is what Zionists are born for ... Terrorism

2006-09-09T15:05:00.000+01:00

Not even the BBC could escape the terrorism of the Zionists. It's e-Terrorism this time!

Have a look at this (click on the image for a larger view)

BBC History Magazine statement:

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have removed our voting system for a short while.

When news of David Irving's arrest in Austria on the charge of Holocaust Denial broke in November 2005, BBC History Magazine ran an online poll via our Web site, which asked the question "Do you think Holocaust denial should be made illegal in Britain?" We reported the result of this poll in our January 2006 issue, with 330 votes being cast in favour, and 277 votes against. We left the poll active on the Web site after we'd announced these results, in line with our normal practice with web polls. We have recently seen a substantial upsurge in voting on the holocaust denial poll. This caused us some technical problems, but more importantly, given that we have already reported on the results in the magazine and thus do not intend to do so again, we felt it was inappropriate to keep the vote open. BBC History Magazine web polls will now close for voting once they have been featured in the magazine. That policy also applies retrospectively to our old polls.

If you are wondering what circumstances there are referring to, read this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/06/giyus_mega...

Pro-Israel lobby targets BBC online poll
By Chris Williams (chris.williams@theregister.co.uk)
Published Wednesday 6th September 2006 11:18 GMT
BBC History Magazine was forced to remove an online poll after it was targeted by a project aimed at influencing internet opinion in Israel's favour.
The Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS) website hosts a downloadable desktop tool called Megaphone. The program alerts users to opinion polls and "talkback" features on news sites so they can respond with pro-Israel views. In turn, users can alert GIYUS operators to any opinion polls they think should be targeted.
The Jerusalem-based World Union of Jewish Students launched GIYUS and Megaphone on 19 July, a week after Israel launched air attacks in Lebanon.
The long-running BBC History Magazine poll posed the question: "Do you think holocaust denial should be made illegal in Britain?" Soon after it was targeted by Megaphone, the poll was pulled. The magazine declined to speak to The Register about the episode.
Prior to contacting The Register, our source corresponded with the magazine. Staff writer Robert Attar wrote at the end of August: "I am aware about this situation. I had a look at their site and all they have done is encouraged their members to vote on the polls which seems legitimate to me. It would also be extremely difficult to prevent groups of people voting in this way. As our polls are not used for any scientific or academic purpose I don't see the problem."
Three days after the launch of Megaphone, Amir Gissin, public affairs director of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to pro-Israel or "Hasbara" organisations to urge them to back the new tactic.
Dear friends,

Many of us recognize the importance of the Internet as the new battleground for Israel's image. It's time to do it better, and coordinate our on-line efforts on behalf of Israel. An Israeli software company have developed a free, safe and useful tool for us - the Internet Megaphone.
Please go to www.giyus.org, download the Megaphone, and you will receive daily updates with instant links to important internet polls, problematic articles that require a talkback, etc.
We need 100,000 Megaphone users to make a difference. So, please distribute this mail to all Israel's supporters.
Do it now. For Israel.
Amir Gissin
Director Public Affairs (Hasbara) Department
GIYUS currently claims 24,000 Megaphone users.
Comparing Megaphone to pro-Palestinian blogs designed to rally support, in comments (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525982026&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull) to the Jerusalem Post on 31 August, Gissin said: "Why can they do it, but we need to sit quietly? The Internet is the communications medium of the future. The government is not behind this initiative, but I can only be happy it exists."
One Megaphone alert dispatched in August said: "Ask the UN to re-examine its position on the Qana incident. Remind the UN that Reuters admitted some of the Qana photos are faked, and that Hezbollah manipulates and uses innocent Lebanese civilians as human shields."
Qana was the scene of a devastating airstrike which killed dozens of civilians, including many children. Israel was widely condemned and the UN security council expressed "shock and distress" at the action.
Other interested parties have called for the initiative to try and stay under the radar. Former Israeli consul-general in New York Alon Pinkas told the Jerusalem Post: "Once it is out there that these are organized talkbacks, then anytime anything positive appears on the web, people will say it is manufactured in Israel."
While the loss of the BBC History poll is relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme, it points to a new highly organised mass manipulation of technologies which are supposed to be democratising and encouraging free expression by individuals.
Megaphone has no registration or identity check, so nothing would stop those opposed to Israel downloading Megaphone and using its alerts to voice opinions against its activities, however. Inevitably, a hacked version already exists which replaces Israeli flags with Palestinian ones and alters some of the text.
However it is used, Megaphone is effectively a high-tech exercise in ballot-stuffing. We're calling it lobbyware.

And to add to the news article, I can assure you that the Zionists had an automated voting system running 24 hours a day to vote "Yes" very rapidly that the BBC server couldn't handle it any more and thus failed.

By the way, despite the Zionist attack on the poll, the results ended up as follows (Thanks to all the free voices in this world):

Yes: 163533 votes

No: 174752 votes

I myself voted "No". And to make my stance clear here I wrote the following:

I'm a Palestinian; I'm also a Human, and thus I care for people like me, whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, followers of other religions, or atheists.
I'm a Palestinian; I can be a Muslim Palestinian, a Christian Palestinian, a Jewish Palestinian, or an atheist Palestinian.
I don't hate the Jews because they are humans like me. Yet I oppose the Zionists because they stole or supported the theft of my homeland.
I don't deny the Holocaust that was committed seven decades ago by the Nazi Germany and its collaborators and in which many Gypsies, Poles (Catholic/Christian, and Jewish), Serbs, Soviet military prisoners of war, civilians on occupied territories including Russians and other East Slavs, mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, Eastern Christians, and Catholic and Protestant clergy were persecuted and killed. I totally condemn this crime and I'm disgusted by its savagery and severity. For me a crime is a crime whether ten or ten million innocent people were killed.
No one denies the holocaust as a crime and as a black spot in the history of humanity. However, like any other major event in our history, people (Historians, Researchers, Writes, etc…) do study the details of the Holocaust and they may agree or disagree on some aspects of it. They may debate on many issues including the number of the holocaust victims, the way they were killed and the reasons and intentions behind their killing.
The Holocaust was a horrible historical incident, yet this does not give some people the right to make it a sacred incident for there was nothing sacred about it. The Holocaust was against groups which included the Jews but were not limited to them. The questioning of some "facts" in relation to the Holocaust has been considered in numerous occasions in the past a "Holocaust denial" and led the questioners to prosecution in different countries in which the denial of the Holocaust is considered an offence.
I do condemn the 1930s' Holocaust, but I also condemn, even more, the apathy and the silence of the whole world on the 58-year-old still ongoing Holocaust committed against the Palestinians by the Zionists in the name of the victims of the first Holocaust. It is the support and approval -even by silence- to this current Holocaust that is more demanding to be considered illegal in the UK and worldwide.
It is for all the above reasons that voted No in the BBC poll

Fight Hollyocrisy :: Sign the Petition

2006-09-06T02:13:00.000+01:00

Action Alert

Eighty-four celebrities, mainly from Hollywood, published a full-page advertisement in the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood Reporter and Variety on August 16.

The advertisement whitewashes Israel's state sponsored terrorism and condemns its victims.

The celebrities' statement is hypocritical; on the one hand they claim to promote justice, freedom and peace on the screen, while on the other hand, they deny the right of Palestinians and Lebanese to attain their freedom and to live in peace in their independent states, the only just solution to the Middle East conflict.

Action 1:

Sign the Petition to the Signatories Here

Action 2:

Please help spreading the message widely by:

1 - posting this action alert in your blog, website and public forums

2- sending it to your mailing list

3- placing the banners below in your blog, website and email signature

This corner banner goes in the upper left corner of your blog. You'll need to paste the code in your blog template's HTML code.

Please give it few minutes of your time.
Together we can make the difference.