It is only a matter of time before an Israeli official is arrested abroad on charges of war crimes

Prosecutions of Israeli political and military figures remain likely despite the failure to obtain an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, the defence minister, when he visited the UK earlier this month, he said. In the Barak case a magistrate accepted advice from the Foreign Office that the minister enjoyed state immunity and rejected an application made on behalf of several residents of the Gaza Strip.

"This needs to be tested at the right time and in the right place," Machover said. "One day one of these people will make a mistake and go to the wrong country and face a criminal process — and then it'll be a matter for the courts of that country to give them a fair trial: that's what the Palestinian victims want."

Amnesty report: Israel denies water to Palestinians

This is not news. This is life under Israeli occupation and apartheid. Read the summary here where you will find the link to the report.

There is an extensive radio documentary from the CBC's Anna Maria Tremonti on the question of water between Israel and the Palestinians (March, 9th, 2009) in which what struck me most at the time is the racist justification of the government of Israel for allowing very little water for palestininans: way of life, they don't need water as much as Israelis do and...let them eat biscuits....

Jim MIles: Uncertain outcomes.

ballot box elixir

The absurd expectation heaped on Afghanistan's election is a fig leaf for leaders seduced by the allure of military power

An excellent article from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian who labels the attitude of western leaders toward elections in Afghanistan as liberal arrogance. I loved he article. Jenkins is saying loud what many of us are thinking. Believe me, this is the obituary of liberalism, and it is such a pity that we should end up emptying our values and most of all our democratic values from their substance just to satisfy our imperial hubris...

Why can't Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 Nato and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul's dust for eight years. We have blown $230bn of US and UK taxpayers' money and left 1,463 soldiers dead. Everything has been tried, from gender awareness courses to carpet-bombing Tora Bora. Thousands of Afghans have been massacred. Yet still the wretches won't co-operate. They even fiddle elections.

That sums up the west's response to the election staged last August by the Afghan ruler, Hamid Karzai. His decision yesterday to run a second round in two weeks has been greeted in Washington and London with an outburst of relieved congratulation. He may have had no option, but he had been raining on Nato's parade.

The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of Sutton and Cheam. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and Nato incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5%.

Nato and the UN were warned well in advance that the election would be rigged, yet their synthetic fury and that of the western media led to the sacking of a capable UN official. The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington's national security council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election.

Power in a dysfunctional state seldom lies with any representative of the majority. Ever since Washington flew Karzai back to Kabul in 2002, he has received billions of dollars in aid money, which he has shrewdly used to barter deals with tribal chiefs and provincial commanders. Afghanistan has never enjoyed unified central government, but what it has emanates from Karzai's status as agent for the occupying power. If America is content for him to squander money on clinging to power, bribing Taliban and fuelling a narco-economy, why is it so fastidious about election rigging?

The answer, of course, lies not in Afghanistan but in Washington and London. This war, like all hopeless wars, is haemorrhaging popularity. From the moment Obama adopted Afghanistan as "his war" and allowed himself to be led by David Petraeus – that most dangerous of generals, a clever strategist – he was engulfed by the siren call of glory. He is now truly trapped.

Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, American voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by "being given democracy", much as Victorian Britons gave them God and the Queen. It was compensation for Kipling's white man's burden, and its "old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard".

If Osama bin Laden cannot be found, if the Taliban cannot be eliminated, if troops cannot be withdrawn, if victory cannot be declared, then western leaders must find a reason for soldiers to die. Like Crusaders of old, they are told to die for the sacrament of a holy grail, in this case the franchise. Therefore it must not be desecrated by dodgy registers, fabricated returns and bought voters' lists.

It does not matter to the British people how the Afghans choose to conduct an election. It does not matter how one of the poorest countries in the world chooses to govern itself under the UN charter of self-determination. Few elections outside western democracies bear much scrutiny. We still hold our noses and deal with Iran, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Russia.

The excuse that we are preventing another 9/11 is ludicrously thin. That event, whose plotting and training were in Europe and America, will cause the US to spend what Congress puts at a staggering $1.3 trillion in wars and related security by 2019. And still no one has arrested Bin Laden. It must be the most extravagant punitive expedition to the Asian mainland since Agamemnon set off for Troy.

The impact on international affairs has been devastating. British foreign secretaries – not least David Miliband – strut the press conferences of the world declaring "what we want to see" in regimes that are no business of Britain. In a BBC interview yesterday, the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown spoke of what "we" should do in Afghanistan as if it were in his old Somerset constituency. Every inch the liberal imperialist, he seemed to think we owned it.

We need look no further for an answer to the question posed by the American pundit Richard Haass. Surveying the wreckage of the Clinton/Bush/Blair years last summer, he asked why the west had squandered the legacy of its victory over communism. It had shifted Russia from humiliating defeat to chauvinist belligerence. It had antagonised half the Muslim world. It had left Europe squabbling and protectionist. China had risen to astonishing commercial power. America had beggared itself with military spending. In sum, the architects of victory had shot themselves in the foot.

The west is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that "the safety of the streets" requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.

Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the west decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.

USrael: the Nozette case and the special relationship

Stewart Nozette who worked for US department of defense was arrested on spying charges by FBI agents acting as Mossad agents. He also worked at the department of Energy and at Nasa. He also worked at the White House on the National Space Council, Executive Office of the President, in 1989 and 1990.
While he held these various critical positions, Nozette ''was a technical adviser for a consultant company that was wholly owned by the Israeli government. Nozette was paid about $225,000 over that period, the court papers say.'' ----
----Nozette is listed also to having contributed to the 2008 campaign of Thad Cochran (R).---To the campaigns of Gordon Smith, Whitman, and Olympia Snowe (R)---As well as to the congressional campaigns of James Kolbe and C. Cox---

There is still plenty of information on him on the web right now but all these links may disappear.

Israel receives extraordianry support from the US on many levels, it has two lobbies in Washington, one of them Aipac, the most successful in the US at par with the health industry lobby, has always Washington's veto in the UN, never obides by UN binding decisions except the ones that decided the partition of Palestine, took the US to war in Iraq, is trying to do the same with Iran, and also needs to soy on its closest ally. What do you expect from this 'light onto the nations' ?

The most complete info on Nozette...

UN human rights council backs the Goldstone Report

Just in...

Goldstone's report accused both sides of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity and said there may even be individual criminal responsibility over the killing of civilians. Around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died in the three-week war.Goldstone's recommendations were that the human rights council should endorse his findings and then pass his report to the UN security council, the general assembly and the prosecutor of the international criminal court. He said both Israel and Hamas should be given six months to conduct their own "appropriate investigations that are independent and in conformity with international standards". If either side failed to investigate properly, he said, the security council should pass the case on to the prosecutor of the international criminal court.

From NYT's Roger Cohen:The ordinary Israel

Israel threatening the international community with war unless the Goldstone report is discarded by the UN

Zionists are quick to blame others for the lack of peace prospects in Palestine. They blamed Arabs, Palestinians, terrorists, the UN, and now they are blaming a 575 pages report for the UN on Israeli war crimes in Gaza. They wanted to bury it with the help of Mr. Nobel peace prize 09 and the collaboration of the illegitimate Mahmoud Abbas but they did not succeed. Palestinians were so angry with Abbas that he had to reverse his position in order to retain a semblance of legitimacy among his people.
Palestinians' thirst for justice can only be measured by the amount of injustice that was inflicted upon them by the zionist state and its acolytes. This time they are determined and hey want a clear condemnation from the international community of war crimes. A Jewish south african judge wrote a report for the UN on war crimes in Gaza with one concern, justice, not politics. But this is precisely what is infuriating Israel. Israel's attitude toward war and peace has become so extreme that it is alienating many in the Jewish diaspora and creating fracture lines. I can't wait to see these Israeli soldiers, commanders, politicians, judged for what they have done to the people of my region...And I don't care if Hamas has to be judged too. I have never been for any party, I am only for those who were dispossessed and are being daily oppressed by Zionists...

Israel says that if the case against it gains steam, the Jewish state will not be able to make the wide-ranging concessions necessary for any peace deal.

This is a bad argument since everybody can argue, based on the history of the Jewish state, the contrary: that Israel was never interested in peace. However, if Israel is genuinely determined to make peace, which comes with land concessions, so let them deliver first and then see what to make of the report.

Turkey excludes Israel from Nato military exercise

And as a result the US and Italy opted out and the exercise was called off.

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, expressed his outrage at the Gaza offensive, launched last December in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks, at the World Economic Forum in Davos the following month, storming out of a session with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres.

The Israeli media noted that while Erdogan's government had long made its displeasure clear, what was new about Israel's exclusion from this week's "Anatolian Eagle" exercises was the role of the Turkish military, which had been closer to Israel than the civilian government.

The Israeli cabinet had an emergency meeting over the weekend to discuss the damage to Israel's most important military relationship in the region.

Turkey is just following the sentiment of the majority of its people. I visited the country in 2006 and 2007 and the protests against the Israeli agression on Lebanon were seen all across Istanbul. And Turkey is acting according to its historic role in the region when the Ottoman empire ruled over most of the middle east including Palestine. Actually, the archeological museum in Istanbul has very interesting artefacts from the region including Palestine. Moreover, Turkey is mending relations with Armenia and no longer need Israel's support in the international community to stop a bill labeling the Turkish invasion of Armenia as a genocide. Israel was happily stoping such a bill in the US congress because it nt only served its special relation with Turkey but, for some unknown reason, zionists viewed this as a competition between them and Armenians.

Marek Edelman, commander in Warsaw ghetto, dies at 90

I read the article from the New York Times this morning and was moved by the story of this man. However, when talking with my husband about him he mentioned that Edelman was known for his anti-zionism. I was surprised that in the NYT article there was no word about the issue. Edelman was a long time member and militant in the general Jewish Labour Union 'Bund' known for their anti-zionism. Edelman himself was anti-zionist and that put him at odds with some of his ghetto anti-Nazi militants who later immigrated to Israel.
In Haaretz for example, most of the story was about Edelman's disconnection from Zionism.

However, zionism and anti-zionism aside, this was a courageous man with a clear cut moral stamina that forces our admiration.

Why all Al-Qaida bomb plots, actual or planned, involve undercover western agents or western converts to Islam helping with material and logistics ?

First and foremost: a famous convert.

The latest Illinois and Texas bomb plots (2009).

The 2006 London bomb plot.

The 2006 Toronto bomb plot.

The 2005 London bombing.

The 2004 Madrid Bombing

A German convert to Islam describes meeting 911 plotters.

Adam Gadham Pearlman, a Jewish convert to islam behind Bin Laden videos

Human rights and USraeli bullying

The UN human rights council in Geneva had been due to vote today on whether to pass the Goldstone report to the UN security council for further action.

That vote will now be delayed until the council meets next, in March next year.

Israel had strongly rejected the findings of the Goldstone report as biased, even though it also criticised the actions of Hamas.

The US administration said it had "very serious concerns" about Goldstone's recommendations, which included a call for the UN security council to investigate and raised the possibility of investigation by the international criminal court and judges from individual countries.

The Palestinians do not have a seat on the 47-member human rights council, but Arab and Muslim countries with council seats had been expected to push for the report to be endorsed.

The Palestinian reversal came after "intense diplomacy" by Washington, which told the Palestinians that going ahead with the vote would harm efforts to restart peace talks with the Israelis, according to diplomats quoted by news agencies.