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Monday, January 16, 2006 |
Expatica: "A decision not to send more troops in Afghanistan would be damaging for Dutch interests in the US, former American diplomat Paul Bremer III warned."
AmericaBlog: "So much for that coalition of the willing. We're now having to extort support for Bush's bumbling foreign policy.
Someone needs to tell the Dutch that Bremer only speaks for the 39% of Americans who currently support President Bush."
1:52:40 PM 
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NYTimes: "Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House."
Polizeros: "Stop hoping Dem leadership will do something. The change will not come from the top down. Real change never does. Instead, it will come from the bottom up. Then, either we become the leaders, replace the corrupt current system with something beholden to the people, or at the very least, force them to do the will of the people."
12:51:56 PM
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BBC: "The Cabinet is considering allowing the tapping of MPs' telephones, Defence Secretary John Reid has acknowledged."
What New Labour has in mind is not fighting terrorism, but total control of politics and society. Are MPs now also possible terrorists who need surveillance? While Tony Blair wants to keep as much as possible of his wheelings and dealings secret from close scrutiny by the public, he is getting Stalinist aspirations.
12:48:27 PM
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Norman Finkelstein: "The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions: 1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott? and 2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.
Illegal killings. Whereas Palestinian suicide attacks targeting Israeli civilians have garnered much media attention, Israel's quantitatively worse record of killing non-combatants is less well known. According to the most recent figures of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'Tselem), 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, of whom 1,008 were identified as combatants, as opposed to 992 Israelis killed, of whom 309 were combatants. This means that three times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed and up to three times more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians.
Torture. 'From 1967,' Amnesty reports, 'the Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects in the Occupied Territories'. B'Tselem found that eighty-five percent of Palestinians interrogated by Israeli security services were subjected to 'methods constituting torture', while already a decade ago Human Rights Watch estimated that 'the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated' was 'in the tens of thousands - a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is under three-quarters of one million'.
House demolitions. 'Israel has implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories,' B'Tselem reports, and since September 2000 'has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes'."
Diplomacy until now has failed. Israel refuses to comply with U.N. resolution 242 and subsequent U.N. resolutions.
"In a courageous initiative American-based Human Rights Watch recently called on the U.S. government to reduce significantly its financial aid to Israel until Israel terminates its illegal policies in the West Bank. An economic boycott would seem to be an equally judicious undertaking."
It seems to me the present situation of support for Israel is guided by European guilt about the abominable treatment of Jews during WW II. Of course, this must never be forgotten, and because it must never be forgotten or excused we shouldn't allow the same treatment on the Palestinian people. American support is mainly driven by capitalist interests in the Middle East. Israel was allowed to develop its own nuclear bombs. Nevertheless, other countries in the region are annihilated or threatened for non-existent WMD.
What is happening now is ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government.
12:14:48 PM
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