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CONFRONTING DISPOSSESSION: CREATING FACTS IN THE MIND
by Karen AbuZayd
Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner General United
Nations Relief and Works Agency
Sixty years ago today the United Nations General Assembly voted into existence a temporary body known as UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA’s task was to deal with the humanitarian consequences of the dispossession of some three quarters of a million Palestine refugees forced by the 1948 Middle East War to abandon their homes and flee their ancestral lands. Just two decades later, the Six Day War generated another spasm of violence and forced displacement, culminating in the occupation of Palestinian territory. Today, anguished exile remains the lot of Palestinians and Palestine refugees. The occupation of Palestinian land persists, there is no Palestinian State and the human rights and fundamental freedoms to which Palestinians are entitled under international law do not exist.
The occupation, now over forty years old, becomes more entrenched with every infringement of human rights and international law in the occupied Palestinian territory. Political actors hold in their hands the power to redress the travesties Palestinians endure. Yet, the approach has been, at best, to equivocate over the minutiae of the occupation – a checkpoint here, a bag of cement there – or, at worst, to look the other way, to acquiesce in or even support the measures causing Palestinian suffering.
A Christmas Guide to Washington’s new Lebanon policy, Checking that list and checking it twice!
Franklin Lamb, Beirut
"There is no obstacle to cooperation with any official in the new Lebanese unity government with the exception of Hezbollah," Nicole Shampaine, the Director of the US Department of State's Near East Affairs Bureau Office for Egypt and the Levant 12/3/09.
Lebanon’s first Sunday morning in December was cold, cloudy and rainy as this politically exhausted country’s’ new Prime Minister, Saad Eddine Hariri, donned a gray track suit, with matching Nike running shoes and joined hundreds of pro-Hezbollah runners, two dreamy Jordanian princesses and 33,000 others from 73 countries as well as all 18 Lebanese confessions for the annual ‘friendship first, competition second’, 42 km Beirut Marathon. Despite the weather, the atmosphere was warm as Christmas decorations were being hung with care across Lebanon in Christian, Shia, Sunni and Druze neighborhoods. Saad, telling race watchers on the sidewalks, “I know I won’t win but I want to participate anyway. We have to bring Lebanese together, and sport is a very important event that can bring them together actually passed on the 42 km course in favor of the 10 km event—but then, how many politicians anywhere, used to the good life, can even run two km these days.
Jews Against Zionism
by Stephen Lendman
They're numerous, outspoken, and range from secular to orthodox to one group calling itself "True Torah Jews Against Zionism."
They believe that "traditional" Jews don't support Zionism, an ideology they call "contrary to Jewish law and beliefs and the teachings of the Holy Torah." They say Zionism:
-- advocates "a political and military end to the Jewish exile;"
The Vanunu Opera and Christmas 2009
eileen fleming
It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings is a proverb that means do NOT assume the outcome of something-such as a sports game-until it has finished.
The proverb originated from Richard Wagner's opera suite Der Ring des Nibelungen in its last part, Götterdämmerung, when the fat lady/the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, delivers an aria that lasts nearly ten minutes and ends the drama.
The Celebration Went Unnoticed - Big Leftist Win in Uruguay
Michael Collins
Uruguay's left wing political coalition, the Broad Front party (Frente Amplio), retained control of the presidency in the November elections. This wasn't just any election. The winner, flower farmer Jose "Pepe" Mujica, was the victim of imprisonment and torture during Operation Condor in the 1970's as a result of his efforts as a Tupamaro rebel. During that period of military dictatorship, the new president spent fourteen years in prison, including two years confined at the bottom of a well.
Mujica won 48% of the vote in the initial round of elections on October 25. He then pushed his total to 52% for a comfortable victory in the November 29 runoff voting against Conservative candidate Luis Alberto Lacalle who gained 44% of the vote. In the 2004 elections, outgoing President Tabaré Vázquez, also of the Broad Front coalition, won with just over 50% of the vote.
Mujica set an expansive tone in his inaugural speech by stating, “My government will be a government of open doors, and above all a negotiating administration … we will demand commitment, compromise and hard work” MercoPress, Nov. 30. He then announced meetings with President Lula da Silva of Brazil and Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
Height of Hypocrisy: Uri Avnery's 'Height of Kitsch'
A rebelnews.org editorial
Israeli activists like Uri Avnery always give me the creeps. They are working so hard to make the rest of the world believe that not all Israelis are bad, but then they have to come up with unflattering comparisons between the Israeli Occupation Forces and the German Wehrmacht. Unflattering for the German Wehrmacht that is.
If those Israeli 'activists' were serious about justice for the Palestinians, they wouldn't parrot the old Judeo-Bolshevik propaganda lies about the bad, bad Nazis. Without the Nazis, there wouldn't be a Zionist colony on Palestinian land, and it's fairly obvious that the Nazis were put into power by the Zionists to create the conditions for it. Let me ask you this sacrilegious 5-year-imprisonment question: If the Nazis had been serious about killing all European Jews, why didn't they do what Stalin's Jewish commissars did so efficiently with millions of Christian Ukrainians, and simply starve them to death?
Project Humanbeingsfirst Responds to The Israel Lobby's Global Propaganda Manual
Zahir Ebrahim
In response to Paul J Balles bringing The Israel Lobby's Global Propaganda Manual titled: “The Israel Project’s 2009 GLOBAL LANGUAGE DICTIONARY” to the public's notice, Project Humanbeingsfirst.org observed, on December 1st, 2009 at 23:10:
Thank you for bringing attention to the final 11th edition of the Orweliian Newspeak Dictionary in the making – 1984, wonderful to watch were it not also reality in the making:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5464625623984168940 'WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST'
Caution: some nudity in a few scenes – but a necessary watch for modern generation un-attuned to reading. The book however is a better study (the link is to one my favorite Kafkaesque moments in the book): http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/15.html
Osama Bin Laden, Dead or Alive?…An irrelevant question asked by David Ray Griffin
Maher Osseiran
I say that it is irrelevant because the war policy makers in the U.S. government can easily deal with a bin Laden death and find ways to justify their never ending war on terror; bin Laden’s vital signs are of little consequence.
In the world of David Ray Griffin and his cheerleaders, if it is possible to prove that bin Laden is dead, wars would immediately come to an end. Such irrational rationale seems to be the noble driving force behind his most recent book, “Osama Bin Laden, Dead or Alive?”, if it were not for its reliance on excessive speculation and falsehoods.
Arundhati Roy Disturbs Democratic Daydreaming
By Trond Øverland
Arundhati Roy is an unusual Indian woman. Instead of acting the graceful upholder of traditional values, she goes on challenging the hard core of establishment thinking. Roy is India’s leading commentator on such evils as militaristic imperialist capitalism, Hindu-supported genocide of Muslims, and dam disasters. In her latest book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers is a collection of essays on such recent events as the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, the 2006 visit to India by “the war criminal” U.S. President George W. Bush, the 2002 Gujarat carnage (between 2000-4000 Muslims slaughtered), the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament by "so-called" Pakistan-based terrorists, and the growing inequality in India (“the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water …”).
Will Congress Criminalize Anti-Semitism and Israeli Criticism?
By Stephen Lendman
In the current climate, perhaps given:
-- America's police state laws;
-- no due process or judicial fairness for any state target;
-- mass illegal surveillance;
-- targeting dissent; and
-- the power of the Israeli Lobby over Congress, the media, academia, the clergy, and most anyone confronting them.
During Israel's war on Gaza, only 5 of 535 congressional members dissented on pro-Israeli resolutions.
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