RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – President Bush defended the actions of his grandfather, Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, who not only supported the Nazi regime before World War II, but financed and traded with the Third Reich. “He only traded with the good Nazis,” Bush said, “who could have known that Hitler would have turned bad, just like who could have known the levies would break in New Orleans.” Bush spoke from Saudi Arabia to defend the comments he made in Jerusalem attacking Senator Barack Obama’s position of talking with enemies. Bush had said such action was equivalent to appeasing the Nazis in 1938.
“I didn’t even mention Obama, when I speachicated about how bad it is to talk when you should be shock and aweing.” Bush said. “You know the old saying about if the shoe fits. Well, if Obama thinks those sneakers are his size, then he is just like Wilt Chamberlain who appeased the Nazis.”
Bush was asked by a reporter if he planned to preemptively attack Iran, commenting that Bush is the only modern leader to preemptively invade a country. Bush answered, “I am not the only one. Don’t forget Poland,” referencing Germany’s preemptive invasion of Poland in 1939 in which Germany claimed Poland had weapons of mass destruction. The invasion started World War II. Bush will end his last Middle East trip on Saturday after he visits a few more world leaders and rattles a few more sabers.
Bush counselor Ed Gillespie challenged Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Joe Biden to point to a sentence that they could consider “reckless” or “outrageous” in Pres. Bush’s recent address to the Knesset. Now that he mentions it… Countdown discusses with Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter.
McCain’s Hypocrisy About The Hamas
McCain’s hypocrisy about the Hamas
May 16: Washington editor of The Nation, Chris Hayes, talks about Sen. John McCain’s previous support of U.S. diplomacy with both Hamas and Syria. Is this another McCain flip-flop?
Chris Matthews: Appease This
Hardball’s Chris Matthews talks about his heated exchange with Los Angeles radio talk show host Kevin James about appeasement and Nazi Germany.
Bushed! Troops Lack Necessary Equipment
Troops lack the equipment they need
May 16: U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that U.S. troops did not get the bomb resistant vehicles they needed because this could “potentially compete with other, longer-term procurement priorities.”
Bush’s Non-Sacrifices For the War
Bush’s non-‘sacrifices’ for the war
May 16: Comedian Paul Mecurio discusses all the things President Bush has NOT given up since the war started.
by Anthony Arnove
socialistworker.org
May 15, 2008
Noam Chomsky has been a dedicated opponent of war and injustice for more than half a century. His dozens of books and writings for innumerable journals have made him one of the best-known radical voices in the U.S. and around the world, responsible for contributing to the commitment and shaping the thinking of countless people.
This year, the New Press published The Essential Chomsky, a collection of Chomsky’s writing on not only politics, but linguistics and more. The book was edited by SocialistWorker.org columnist Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. Here, we republish Anthony’s introduction from the book, with permission from him and New Press.
***
FROM HIS early essays in the liberal intellectual journal The New York Review of Books, to his most recent books Hegemony or Survival, Failed States and Interventions, Noam Chomsky has produced a singular body of political criticism.
American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), his first published collection of political writing (dedicated “To the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war”), contains essays that still stand out for their insight and biting sarcasm nearly four decades later. “It is easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights,” Chomsky wrote in that book, setting himself apart from the vast majority of the war’s critics who saw it as a “tragic mistake,” rather than as a part of a long history of U.S. imperialism.
Since 1969, Chomsky has produced a series of books on U.S. foreign policy in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, all the while maintaining his commitments to linguistics research, philosophy and to teaching. And throughout, he has consistently lent his support to movements and organizations involved in efforts for social change, continuing a tradition of intellectual and active social engagement he developed early in his youth.
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It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country’s forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue.
But this year’s Independence Day festivities have concealed as much as they have revealed. The images of joy and celebration seen by the world have failed to acknowledge the reality of a deeply divided Israel, shared by two peoples with conflicting memories and claims to the land.
They have also served to shield from view the fact that the Palestinians’ dispossession is continuing in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. Far from being a historical event, Israel’s “independence” — and the ever greater toll it is inflicting on the Palestinian people — is very much a live issue.
Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population — more than one million Palestinian citizens — remembered al-Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society.
As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel’s Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.
But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year’s march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.
Although most of the refugees from the 1948 war — numbering in their millions — ended up in camps in neighbouring Arab states, a few remained inside Israel. Today one in four Palestinian citizens of Israel is either a refugee or descended from one. Not only have they been denied the right ever to return to their homes, like the other refugees, but many live tantalisingly close to their former communities.
The destroyed Palestinian villages have either been reinvented as exclusive Jewish communities or buried under the foliage of national forestation programmes overseen by the Jewish National Fund and paid for with charitable donations from American and European Jews.
There have been many Nakba processions held over the past week but the march across fields close by the city of Nazareth was the only one whose destination was a former Palestinian village now occupied by Jews.
The village of Saffuriya was bombed from the air for two hours in July 1948, in one of the first uses of air power by the new Jewish state. Most of Saffuriya’s 5,000 inhabitants fled northwards towards Lebanon, where they have spent six decades waiting for justice. But a small number went south towards Nazareth, where they sought sanctuary and eventually became Israeli citizens.
Today they live in a neighbourhood of Nazareth called Safafra, after their destroyed village. They look down into the valley where a Jewish farming community known as Zippori has been established on the ruins of their homes.
This year’s Nakba procession to Saffuriya was a small act of defiance by Palestinian citizens in returning to the village, even if only symbolically and for a few hours. The threat this posed to Israeli Jews’ enduring sense of their own exclusive victimhood was revealed in the unprovoked violence unleashed against the defenceless marchers, many of them children.
Like many others, I was there with a child — my five-month-old daughter. Fortunately, for her and my sake, we left after she grew tired from being in the heat for so long, moments before the trouble started.
When we left, things were entirely peaceful. Nonetheless, as we drove away, I saw members of a special paramilitary police unit known as the Yassam appearing on their motorbikes. The Yassam are effectively a hit squad, known for striking out first and asking questions later. Trouble invariably follows in their wake.
The events that unfolded that afternoon have been captured on mostly home-made videos that can be viewed on the internet, including here. The context for understanding these images is provided below in accounts from witnesses to the police attack:
Several thousand Palestinians, waving flags and chanting Palestinian songs, marched towards a forest planted on Saffuriya’s lands. Old people, some of whom remembered fleeing their villages in 1948, were joined by young families and several dozen sympathetic Israeli Jews. As the marchers headed towards Saffuriya’s spring, sealed off by the authorities with a metal fence a few years ago to stop the villagers collecting water, they were greeted with a small counter-demonstration by right-wing Israeli Jews.
They had taken over the fields on the other side of the main road at the entrance to what is now the Jewish community of Zippori. They waved Israeli flags and sang nationalist Hebrew songs, as armed riot police lined the edge of the road that separated the two demonstrations.
Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Culture and Tourism Association whose parents were expelled from Saffuriya, said: “There were some 50 Jewish demonstrators who had been allowed to take over the planned destination of our march. Their rights automatically trumped ours, even though there were thousands of us there and only a handful of them.”
The police had their backs to the Jewish demonstrators while they faced off with the Palestinian procession. “It was as if they were telling us: we are here only for the benefit of Jews, not for you,” said Shehadeh. “It was a reminder, if we needed it, that this is a Jewish state and we are even less welcome than usual when we meet as Palestinians.”
The marchers turned away and headed uphill into the woods, to a clearing where Palestinian refugees recounted their memories.
When the event ended in late afternoon, the marchers headed back to the main road and their cars. In the police version, Palestinian youths blocked the road and threw stones at passing cars, forcing the police to use force to restore order.
Dozens of marchers were injured, including women and children, and two Arab Knesset members, Mohammed Barakeh and Wassel Taha, were bloodied by police batons. Mounted police charged into the crowds, while stun grenades and tear gas were liberally fired into fields being crossed by families. Eight youths were arrested.
Shehadeh, who was close to the police when the trouble began, and many other marchers say they saw the Jewish rightwingers throwing stones at them from behind the police. A handful of Palestinian youngsters responded in kind. Others add that the police were provoked by a young woman waving a Palestinian flag.
“None of the police were interested in stopping the Jews throwing stones. And even if a few Palestinian youths were reacting, you chase after them and arrest them, you don’t send police on mounted horseback charging into a crowd of families and fire tear gas and stun grenades at them. It was totally indiscriminate and reckless.”
Clouds of gas enveloped the slowest families as they struggled with their children to take cover in the forest.
Therese Zbeidat, a Dutch national who was there with her Palestinian husband Ali and their two teenage daughters, Dina and Awda, called the experiences of her family and others at the hands of the police “horrifying”.
“Until then it really was a family occasion. When the police fired the tear gas, there were a couple near us pushing a stroller down the stony track towards the road. A thick cloud of gas was coming towards us. I told the man to leave the stroller and run uphill as fast as he could with the baby.
“Later I found them with the baby retching, its eyes streaming and choking. It broke my heart. There were so many families with young children, and the police charge was just so unprovoked. It started from nothing.”
The 17-year-old boyfriend of Therese Zbeidat’s daughter, Awda, was among those arrested. “It was his first time at any kind of nationalist event,” she said. “He was with his mother, and when we started running up the hill away from the police on horseback, she stumbled and fell.
“He went to help her and the next thing a group of about 10 police were firing tear gas cannisters directly at him. Then they grabbed him by the keffiyah [scarf] around his neck and pulled him away. All he was doing was helping his mother!”
Later, Therese and her daughters thought they had made it to safety only to find themselves in the midst of another charge from a different direction, this time by police on foot. Awda was knocked to the ground and kicked in her leg, while Dina was threatened by a policeman who told her: “I will break your head.”
“I’ve been on several demonstrations before when the police have turned nasty,” said Therese, “but this was unlike anything I’ve seen. Those young children, some barely toddlers, amidst all that chaos crying for their parents – what a way to mark Independence Day!”
Jafar Farah, head of the political lobbying group Mossawa, who was there with his two young sons, found them a safe spot in the forest and rushed downhill to help ferry other children to safety.
The next day he attended a court hearing at which the police demanded that the eight arrested men be detained for a further seven days. Three, including a local journalist who had been beaten and had his camera stolen by police, were freed after the judge watched video footage of the confrontation taken by marchers.
Farah said of the Independence Day events: “For decades our community was banned from remembering publicly what happened to us as a people during the Nakba. Our teachers were sacked for mentioning it. We were not even supposed to know that we are Palestinians.
“And in addition, the police have regularly used violence against us to teach us our place. In October 2000, at the start of the intifada, 13 of our unarmed young men were shot dead for demonstrating. No one has ever been held accountable.
“Despite all that we started to believe that Israel was finally mature enough to let us remember our own national tragedy. Families came to show their children the ruins of the villages so they had an idea of where they came from. The procession was becoming a large and prominent event. People felt safe attending.
“But we were wrong, it seems. It looked to me very much like this attack by the police was planned. I think the authorities were unhappy about the success of the processions, and wanted them stopped.
“They may yet win. What parent will bring their children to the march next year knowing that they will be attacked by armed police?”
Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer living in Nazareth, Israel. His most recent book is “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”, published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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For more: http://linktv.org/originalseries
“Bush Speaks in Israeli Knesset,” IBA TV, Israel
“Palestinians Re-affirm Right of Return,” Al Jazeera English, Qatar
“Abbas Must Dissolve Palestinian Authority,” Al Jazeera TV, Qatar
“Lebanese Government Withdraws Decision Against Hezbollah,” Dubai TV, UAE
“Iraqi Forces Deployed in Mosul,” Al Arabiya TV, UAE
“Rebels Target Civilians in Omdurman, Sudan,” Sudan TV, Sudan
“Water Shortage in Diala, Iraq,” Baghdad TV, Iraq
Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani.
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has called on European and Latin American nations to set up a $1bn fund to help provide food and medicine for the poor.
Chavez said on Thursday that he was willing to commit $365m of the country’s oil income to the fund, as global food and energy prices continue to rise.
“[The fund] will allow us to produce, buy and distribute food and medicines to the homes of the poorest families,” he said at a news conference in Caracas.
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But the White House Moron has the roles reversed. It is not Iran that is threatening war. It is Bush. It is not Bush who is appeasing. It is Iran.
Iran has not responded in kind to any of Bush’s warlike moves and provocations. Iran has not sunk a single one of our sitting-duck ships and has not given the Iraqi insurgents any weapons that would easily turn the tide of war against the US.
It is Bush, not Iran, who sounds like Adolf Hitler blustering and threatening. It is Bush’s American Brownshirts, the neocons, who express the view: “what’s the good of nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.”
It is the US that is funding assassination teams inside Iran and using taxpayer dollars to fund dissident and violent organizations opposed to the Iranian government. Iran is doing no such thing here.
It is members of the Bush Regime and US generals who continue to lie through their teeth about Iranian support for insurgents, for which they can supply no evidence, and about Iranian nuclear weapons programs, for which the IAEA inspectors can find no sign.
It is the US print and TV media that serves the Bush Regime as propaganda ministry for its lies of aggression.
All the war crimes that are being planned are being planned by Bush and Olmert.
What would George Orwell make of the Bush Regime’s position that anything less than a direct act of naked aggression is appeasement?
The Chicago City Council has passed a resolution “opposing any US attack on Iran and urging the Bush Administration to pursue diplomatic engagement with that nation.” But the White House Moron says diplomacy is appeasement. He learned this false equivalence from the neocon Brownshirts whose control over his administration has made America despised throughout the world, with the exception of Israel.
After broadcasting false claims for weeks from US generals and Bush Regime spokespersons that the US has “definite proof” in the form of captured Iranian weapons that Iranians were “responsible for killing American troops”, the great free American media went silent when LA Times correspondent Tina Susman reported from Baghdad: “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran.”
A people devoid of a media are sitting ducks for tyrannical government, which is what the US has.
What is the difference between Hitler’s concocted excuses for his acts of naked aggression and the Bush Regime’s plan to use a briefing by General Petraeus, with “captured Iranian weapons” as props, as proof of Iranian complicity in US deaths in Iraq as a means to break down public and congressional resistance to an attack on Iran?
Why has the Bush Regime suffered no consequences for this blatant attempt to orchestrate an excuse for another war?
Why have there been no consequences to the Regime for the blatant lies it told in order to attack Iraq?
Why has the Bush Regime suffered no consequences for its violation of US statutory laws against spying without warrants and against torture?
In the US criminal justice system, three strikes and you are out.
For the Bush Regime is there any limit on its lawless behavior?
How many strikes? A dozen? Thirty? Three hundred?
Is there a limit?
Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March, 2008.
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by Steve Fox
American Freedom Campaign
May 16, 2006
More than seven years too late, it appears as if a growing number of congresspersons are realizing that they are part of a co-equal branch of government. After allowing their institution to be disrespected and at times ignored by the executive branch, top officials in Congress are finally expressing a willingness to use their full power under the Constitution to rein in an out-of-control administration.
The current target: Karl Rove.
Rove has been asked by the House Judiciary Committee to testify about his involvement in the Justice Department’s prosecution and imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don Siegleman. As Rove has so far refused to testify voluntarily, members of Congress have started sending signals that they are prepared to go to the mattresses over this.
Two prominent members of the House Judiciary Committee have advocated the use of “inherent contempt” against Rove, which would allow the House Sergeant-of-Arms to forcibly bring Rove to the House to testify.
We need you to let your representative know that you support this forceful action. If you agree that Congress should arrest Karl Rove and force him to testify before the House, please fill in the information below and click on “Send my message.”
The Washington-based Cato Institute is all about “Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace,” or so says its web site. It’s been around since 1977 preaching limited government and free market religion with plenty of high-octane corporate funding for backing. It better have it for the award it presented on May 15. It was to a 23 year old fifth year Venezuelan law student at Universidad Catolica Andres Bello. Yon Goicoechea was the fourth recipient of the “Milton Friedman Liberty Prize” in the amount of $500,000. For what? What else. For serving the interests of capital back home and leading anti-Chavista protests.
Goicoechea is leader of Venezuela’s “pro-democracy student movement” that in Cato’s words “prevented Hugo Chavez’s regime from seizing broad dictatorial powers in December 2007.” The reference is to the narrow defeat of Venezuela’s reform referendum last December. Goicoechea led student-organized street violence against Venezuela’s democracy, but don’t look for Cato to say that.
It played up Goicoechea’s “pivotal role in organizing and voicing opposition to the erosion of human and civil rights in his country (that) would have concentrated unprecendented political and economic power in the hands of the government.” Instead, he chooses “tolerance” and the “human right to seek prosperity.” He’s been active since student and other opposition emerged against the Chavez government’s refusal (with ample justification) to renew RCTV’s VHF operating license last May.
Then, and in the run-up to last December’s referendum, Cato says he stood down “ongoing death threats and continual intimidation due to his prominent and vocal leadership.” He’s been “indispensable in organizing massive, peaceful protest marches that have captured the world’s attention.” In fact, there were no death threats but plenty of hard right intimidation targeting Chavistas with tools like Goicoechea a part of it.
Cato founder and president Edward Crane said “We hope the Friedman Prize will help further his non-violent advocacy for basic freedoms in an increasingly militaristic and anti-democratic Venezuela.” Far right novelist Mario Vargas Llosa added that “freedom is disappearing” in Venezuela, and “Goicoechea is a symbol of (a) democratic reaction when (it’s) threatened.”
Goicoechea received his award at a $500 a plate dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Prominent corporate and government types attended, all representing far right interests. None explain how Bolivarianism works, its participatory democracy, its commitment to Venezuela’s people, or how it’s lifted millions in the country out of desperate poverty. Nor is there comment on a model process, impressive social reforms, supremely democratic elections, or Hugo Chavez’s immense popularity. An April 24 – May 2 Venezuela Data Analysis Institute (IVAD) poll puts him at 68.8%. That compares to comparable George Bush ones with some of the lowest ratings ever for a US president.
No discussion either of how student opposition is funded or for what purpose. That their money comes from US agencies like the misnamed National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, the International Republican Institute, and other pro-business US and international agencies and organizations. CIA’s part of it, too.
Highlighted are Goicoechea’s plans with the money – to challenge Bolivarianism back home and work to subvert it. With those ideas and Cato’s backing, he’s sure to remain a hard right favorite. He’ll also be busy and well-compensated – for more destabilization against the most democratic government in the hemisphere. That’s what Goicoecheas are for – to sabotage democracy, subvert equity and justice, topple populist governments, and make Venezuela “friendlier” for business.
Goicoechea now heads home fully briefed for his role, but don’t expect Cato to explain it. It’s to support capital’s divine right, privilege over beneficial social change, and the rights of the few over the many. It’s to mobilize indignation against a leader who works for all Venezuelans, especially those in greatest need. Who uses his country’s oil wealth for his people, not elitist business interests. For having a Constitution that mandates it. For gaining overwhelming popular support and becoming a hero to millions. For wanting others to share in what Venezuelans have. For believing all people matter, not just the privileged. For becoming the greatest of all threats to the empire (and Cato) determined to stop him. For failing so far. For seeing him gain strength and stature. For securing grassroots allies everywhere. For needing many Goicoecheas to oppose him, but not nearly enough to prevail.
His “non-violent advocacy” and “peaceful” protesting went like this – promoting class warfare; wanting Chavez toppled; and following CIA diktats to:
— “take to the streets; protest with violent disruptive actions across the nation; create a climate of ungovernability; provoke a general uprising; isolate Chavez” internationally; destabilize the government; disrupt the constitutional process; sustain aggressive agitprop; build unity among the opposition; and end Chavismo and Bolivarianism so capital can get back in control.
Last year, Goicoechea responded by engaging in violent street clashes; targeting pro-Chavez students, police and the National Guard; smashing windows; turning over and setting cars alight; starting other fires; burning tires; throwing rocks and bottles; engaging in a shootout at Caracas’ Central University; seeing Venezuela’s business media report “peaceful, civic and democratic” students were attacked without provocation; and getting full US (and Cato) backing for all of the above.
Like others of his class, Goicoechea enjoys privilege and wants to keep it. He’s also unwilling to share it, and he puts it this way: “We have to fight for our future, for our rights,” and you know whose he means. “If we don’t fight for our freedoms, we won’t be able to take part in a democratic Venezuela in the future.” He means democracy for the few like in pre-Chavez days.
Gabriela Calderon shares that view as editor of ElCato.org, Cato’s Spanish language website. She’s young, well-educated, anti-Chavez, and also against Bolivarianism’s spread to her native country of Ecuador. Cato says she’s a “frontline” warrior in “the struggle against Hugo Chavez’s ’21st century socialism,’ which is threatening to engulf all of Latin America.” She, in turn, calls populists like Chavez and Ecuador’s President Raphael Correa “the reactionary right” for in Cato’s words: “pushing for greater state control over the economy and people’s lives. By contrast, she – and ElCato.org – advocates for individual freedom.” That means privatizing everything, favoring property over people, privilege over the needy, crowding out dissent, and getting well-rewarded for supporting all of the above.
These are imperial interests. Youths like Goicoechea and Calderon are its tools, and organizations like Cato are front and center supporting them. It’s bankrolled by business, given clear marching orders, and they’re full of high-octane markets uber alles religion. But in the spirit of “Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace.” Orwell would approve.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM – 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening.
The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
May 16th 2008 – Anti-US protests emerge after Damadola is struck by drone missiles
Several people were killed in a missile strike in northwest Pakistan’s Bajaur Agency on Wednesday. The Dawn newspaper reports that local witnesses saw unmanned US drones fire two missiles on a compound where militants had gathered for dinner. The U.S. has not confirmed its involvement, but is believed to operate predator drones into Pakistan out of Afghanistan. In 2006, a drone missile killed 82 people, and a spate of strikes this March killed 25 people in the same region.
On Thursday, several thousand protesters led by Islamist political party leaders attended anti-US and anti-Musharraf rallies in response to “the U.S. aggression”, which is suspected to have been agreed to some extent by Pakistani authorities.
The US led violence is not restricted to the tribal areas of Pakistan. Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions, Philip Alston reported that following his 12 day fact-finding mission, he found that around 200 Afghan civilians have been killed this year alone by international military forces.
May 16th 2008 – Clashes mark Palestinian day of remembrance; President Bush delivers speech to Israeli Knesset
Sporadic clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians marked the Palestinian day of remembrance known as al-Nakba or “the catastrophe”. A day of celebration in Israel, al-Nakba, for the Palestinians marks the expulsion of about 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. Meanwhile President Bush delivered a speech to the Israeli Knesset limiting his mention of the Palestinians to just one sentence.
A Haaretz editorial stated that “the creeping annexation of parts of Arab neighborhoods will turn a political conflict into a religious struggle.” The editorial went on to state that “The United States, Israel’s greatest friend and the broker of the two-state vision, will not emerge clean either. A close friend of the Israelis is not permitted to stand on the sidelines while their government is playing with matches next to a barrel of explosives”: http://therealnews.com/web/index.php?thisdataswitch=0&thisid=1514&thisview=item&renewx=2008-05-16+10%3A14%3A57
(Also available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twboG40Ygg8)
Dandelion Salad 