Intentional and planned

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The plot against Gaza


Jonathan Cook

Israel has justified its assault on Gaza as entirely defensive, intended only to stop Hamas firing rockets on Israel's southern communities. Although that line has been repeated unwaveringly by officials since Israel launched its attack on 27 December, it bears no basis to reality. Rather, this is a war against the Palestinians of Gaza, and less directly those in the West Bank, designed primarily to crush their political rights and their hopes of statehood.

The most glaring evidence contradicting the Israeli casus belli is the six-month ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that preceded the invasion. True, Hamas began firing its rockets as soon as the truce came to an end on 19 December, but Israel had offered plenty of provocation. Not least it broke the ceasefire by staging a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas members. Even more significantly, it maintained and tightened a blockade during the ceasefire period that was starving Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants of food, medicine and fuel. Hamas had expected the blockade lifted in return for an end to the rockets.

A few days before Israel's attack on Gaza, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's domestic security service, the Shin Bet, noted Hamas' commitment to the ceasefire and its motives in restarting the rocket fire. "Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce," he told the cabinet. "It seeks to improve its conditions -- a removal of the blockade, receiving a commitment from Israel that it won't attack and extending the lull to the Judea and Samaria area [the West Bank]." In other words, had Israel wanted calm, it could have avoided invading Gaza simply by renegotiating the truce on more reasonable terms.

Israel, however, had little interest in avoiding a confrontation with Hamas, as events since the Islamic group's takeover of Gaza in early 2006 show.

Crime's Gleeful Abandon in Gaza

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Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque
More and more, comment on Israel's savage attack on the people of Gaza seems superfluous. The facts -- even the modicum of facts that can be gleaned through the deadly wall of Israeli censorship and the perverse and sinister distortions of the American media -- speak loudly, with horrifying clarity, for themselves. We are witnessing monstrous crimes, committed with cold deliberation: a bloodthirsty spectacle of unbridled terrorism, openly celebrated by the political and media elites of Israel and America.

You'll miss him

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Thank you George for sabotaging the US Empire
I have always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job.

Bush leaves America a poorer but in many ways a better place, moreconscious of its blessings. Just as it took bad King John to force thedrafting of the Magna Carta, on Bush's watch Americans have learned,amidst the threat of losing them, that they have constitutionalprotections.

A commander in-chief who made Jerry Ford sound like Demosthenes hasgiven them a fresh sensitivity to language, even the dream that theymight have a president who can speak in whole sentences.

The Scots are..erm...'prudent'

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So who would claim a £1 donation on expenses?

Expense claims rejected by the Scottish Parliament authorities:
  • Bill Butler, the Labour MSP for Glasgow Anniesland and a former candidate for deputy leader, listed a £1 claim for a "charity donation".

  • Senior Labour MSP, Malcolm Chisholm, tried and failed to get £3 back for a charge on a pay-as-you-go smart card.

  • David Whitton, Labour's finance spokesman, who wanted £290 in expenses for printing Christmas cards.

  • Alex Fergusson, the Presiding Officer, wanted to recover the £132.78 cost of a "congratulatory advert" for a constituency charity for disadvantaged children.

Prescient or what?

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Jews sans frontieres: Benefit of foresight
The theory that the Jews are to come into Palestine and oust the Moslem cultivators by 'equitable purchase' or other means is in violation of principles of sound policy, and would, if accepted, arouse violent outbreaks against the Jewish minority. It would, moreover, arouse fierce Moslem hostility and fanaticism against the Western powers that permitted it. The effect of this hostility would be felt all through the Middle East, and would cause trouble in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India. To this might be ascribed by future historians the outbreak of a great war between the white and the brown races, a war into which America would without doubt be drawn.
Anstruther Mackay, Military Governor of Ramleh, Palestine.
The Atlantic Monthly, July 1920.

No place for hate in the Empire State?!

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Max Blumenthal: Pro-Israel Rally Attended by Big-Time NY Dems Descends into Calls for 'Wiping Out' Palestinians
No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel’s war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world’s most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it.

The rally made me think of a passage in “The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes,” a powerful new book by former Israeli Knesset speaker and Jewish National Fund chairman Avraham Burg:

“If you are a bad person, a whining enemy or a strong-arm occupier, you are not my brother, even if you are circumcised, observe the Sabbath, and do mitzvahs. If your scarf covers every hair on your head for modest, you give alms and do charity, but what is under your scarf is dedicated to the sanctity of Jewish land, taking precedence over the sanctity of human life, whosever life that is, then your are not my sister. You might be my enemy.

A good Arab or a righteous gentile will be a brother or sister to me. A wicked man, even of Jewish descent, is my adversary, and I would stand on the other side of the barricade and fight him to the end.”
Read the whole piece and watch the video

The broken watch

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Even a broken watch is right twice a day.

OK, there is a certain irony in Mad Mel calling Harman 'unhinged' but she's got a point:

Harriet Harman's Orwellian 'equality' agenda is not just sinister - it's positively unhinged
listening to her is a bit like entering a time-warp and being subjected to some ghastly student radical circa 1970 nasally boring on about the class/gender/race struggle. That’s because she - and a number of her ministerial colleagues - were indeed part of that generation of privileged baby-boomers who indulged in adolescent fantasy politics about changing society and human nature - but who, crucially, never grew out of it.

What then happened was that between 1979 and 1997 they were kept out of power by three successive Conservative administrations. And when they finally clawed their way into government, they were then in a position to put into practice the adolescent politics which had been stored in aspic and beyond which they had never progressed.

The way forward is obvious. The Equalities Minister must put her money where her mouth is.

By her own lights, the best way the public school-educated Harman could do her bit to ‘tackle the class divide’ would surely be to step down as an MP forthwith so that a working-class person could take her place.

I am not worthy

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Tom Engelhardt: Prelude to an Inaugural
We have just lived through a commander-in-chief presidency whose oppressive power and overwhelming hubris would undoubtedly have left (the) early presidents in shock, if not armed revolt. They would have seen George Bush's world - in which strength was the byword of power and weakness an anathema - as the scion of European autocracy.

These were, after all, men wary of armies and military power, who had sacrificed the very idea of executive strength to a tripartite form of government that would, they hoped, have the advantages of resiliency and responsibility. They understood, and embraced, certain limits that Americans may only be waking up to now.