“We Invented The Car Bomb”

Car bombing has become synonymous with the Middle East in recent years, so few people would be surprised to realise that this most destructive and indiscriminate form of terror became established in this part of the world.

However, less well known is the fact that this was originally a Jewish weapon used against the Arabs.

The method of killing and destruction was actually pioneered in 1920 in New York, and in a cart rather than a car. An Italian anarchist called Mario Buda packed a horse-drawn wagon with explosives and killed dozens of innocent bystanders on Wall Street in a protest against capitalism.

However, the first bomb to be transported to a target in a motorised vehicle was created by two fighters of the Lehi movement in pre-state Palestine.

These pioneers of a uniquely horrible form of warfare are still alive and were interviewed by the presenter, former CIA agent Bob Baer.

Yaakov Heruti and Eliezer Ben-Ami explained how they chose their target, the Soraya building in Jaffa, used as the headquarters of the armed Arab resistance. They parked their truck bomb outside the building and set it off, killing 28 people including innocent bystanders, and injuring hundreds more.

The two 83-years-old were unrepentant about the operation but regretted the non-combatant casualties. Said Heruti:

“We never wanted to kill innocent civilians and children, it happened by bad luck.”

Perhaps, but it must have crossed their minds that by exploding a truck packed with explosives in a crowded street without any warning, civilians and children were likely to be blown away along with enemy fighters.

This was not a film that set out to make any moral points – indeed most of those interviewed showed little remorse for their actions – but it did demonstrate that in every single case, the reverberations of the explosions had a negative impact on those who planted the bomb as much as on those who were attacked.

After the Lehi bomb, an Arab called Fawzi El Kuttub set about wreaking vengeance on the Jews. Trained by the Nazis in bomb-making, he aped the Jewish fighters by setting off car bombs which killed Jewish civilians in Jerusalem, and came close to assassinating future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. When the smoke eventually cleared, eight car bombs had been set off – four Arab, four Jewish – claiming 120 lives.

Source: The Jewish Chronicle

Attacks On Israeli Soldiers Legitimate and Not Terrorism

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni came under fire for making a distinction between terrorists who attack civilians and enemy fighters who fight against IDF soldiers. 

 

“Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back, but I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism, if the target is a soldier,” Livni said in an interview three weeks ago on US television network ABC’s Nightline that was broadcast on Israel Radio Tuesday. 

 

During the ABC interview, Livni was asked whether she considered her father, Eitan, who was the Irgun Zva’i Leumi’s director of operations during the pre-state days and fought British rule, a terrorist. 

 

She replied that her father fought against British soldiers, not civilians, and agreed that if Hamas used suicide bombings only against soldiers she would not call that “terrorism.”

Israel’s former Consul General Alon Pinkas, who was frequently interviewed on Nightline, said that groups that exclusively target soldiers can legitimately be called “guerrilla organizations.” 

 

Livni reiterated in an interview to Israel Radio Tuesday morning what she had said in the Nightline interview; namely, that attacks specifically against soldiers could be seen as “more legitimate” than attacks on Israeli civilians. 

 

Fury As Israeli Minister Says Deadly Attacks On Troops Are Not Terrorism

 

Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has broken a taboo by declaring that Palestinians who kill Israeli soldiers are not terrorists.

 

The row began when Israeli radio broadcast an interview in which 48-year-old Mrs Livni said that attacks on Israeli soldiers were “more legitimate” than attacks on Israeli civilians.

 

“Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back,” she said. “But I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism if the target is a soldier.”

Mrs Livni first made her comments during an interview recorded several weeks ago by the American ABC television network, where they went largely unnoticed.

But when they were broadcast in Israel this week they provoked an immediate angry reaction.

[Tzipi Livni’s defining and making a distinction between legitimate acts of resistance and terrorism, occurred back in 2006. It’s a significant statement and assessment by a major Israeli official which remains relevant and can’t be recanted]

“We Are Declaring Israel A Terrorist State”

Bolivia renounced a visa exemption agreement with Israel in protest over its offensive in Gaza, and declared it a terrorist state.

President Evo Morales announced the move during a talk with a group of educators in the city of Cochabamba.

It “means, in other words, we are declaring (Israel) a terrorist state,” he said.

The treaty has allowed Israelis to travel freely to Bolivia without a visa since 1972.

Morales said the Gaza offensive shows “that Israel is not a guarantor of the principles of respect for life and the elementary precepts of rights that govern the peaceful and harmonious coexistence of our international community.”

Bolivia broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 over a previous military operation in Gaza.

In mid-July, Morales filed a request with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to prosecute Israel for “crimes against humanity.”

Gaza The Broken Hearted

The Language Of Death

World Can’t Wait helped produce a town meeting last night, sponsored by Revolution Books in New York City.

 

Chris Hedges gave the main address.

 

The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating, squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building a series of ringed Palestinian enclaves where the Israeli military will have the ability to instantly shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate the misery.   

 

Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods. Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.

Images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. 

Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. Families who carry the broken bodies of their children to hospitals do not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of those they love do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a “martyr”?

 

The refusal by our political leaders, from Barack Obama to all but five members of Congress, to the major media to speak out in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and our hypocrisy. 

 

The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity is being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians is a betrayal of the memory of those killed in other genocides from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia. 

 

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not — no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against — you are culpable.   And we are very culpable. 

 

The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs are all part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid we give to Israel. Palestinians are being slaughtered with American-made weapons. They are being slaughtered by an Israeli military we lavishly bankroll. But perhaps our callousness indifference to human suffering is to be expected. We, after all, kill women and children on an even vaster scale in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

 

[End of Speech]

 

The bloody hands of Israel mirror our own.

 

“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe recently, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system… Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”

 

Israel operates under the illusion that it can crush Hamas and install a quisling Palestinian government in Gaza and the West Bank. This puppet government will be led, Israel believes, by the discredited Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abass, now cowering in the West Bank after being driven out of Gaza. Abbas, like most of the corrupt Fatah leadership, is a detested figure. He is dismissed as the Marshall Pétain of the Palestinian people, or perhaps the Hamid Karzai or the Nouri al-Maliki. He is as loathed as he is powerless. 

 

Israel’s destruction of Hamas and reoccupation of Gaza will not bring peace or security to Israel. It will merely obliterate the only internal organization with enough stature and authority in Gaza, an organization elected to power in free and fair elections, to maintain order. The Israeli attack empowers the Islamic movements across the regime who one day may well ring Israel like a vice. It reduces all communication to the language of force. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel. 

 

Forty plus years after W.H. Auden described the dumb ogre loose in the streets of Prague, he lopes, still dumb, again through the alleyways of Gaza City:

 

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

 

About a subjugated plain,

 

Among it’s desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Calls For Genocide Enter Israeli Mainstream

As we watch the horrifying slaughter unfold in Gaza, bear in mind the Israeli psychosis that fuels and justifies it. Here are comments from three rightwing Israelis – two leading politicians and a professor – who very much reflect a strain of mainstream thinking in Israel, one that the international media largely avoids noting.

Each, in their different ways, is advocating a genocide of the Palestinians.

Ayelet Shaked, of economics minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, calls on her Facebook page for murdering the mothers of what she terms Palestinian “terrorists” (a very broad concept indeed in current Israeli thinking) so that they cannot give birth to more “little snakes”:

 

They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists. They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists. … [The terrorists] are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, believes the sisters and mothers of Palestinian “terrorists” should be raped:

 

A terrorist, like those who kidnapped the boys [in the West Bank on June 12] and killed them, the only thing that will deter them, is if they know that either their sister or mother will be raped if they are caught. What can we do? This is the culture that we live in.

Note that his university did not reprimand him. They defended his comments:

 

The purpose was to define the culture of death of the terrorist organizations. Dr Kedar illustrated in his words the bitter reality of the Middle East and the inability of a modern and law-abiding country to fight the terror of suicide bombers.

And finally we have Moshe Feiglin, a deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, urging the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave:

 

[Netanyahu] announces that Israel is about to attack military targets in their area and urges those who are not involved and do not wish to be harmed to leave immediately. Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel’s humanitarian efforts. … All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage’. …

 

The IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations. … The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave. Israel will generously aid those who wish to leave.

This psychosis is not going to get better on its own. In fact, it’s going to get much worse. How much worse will depend entirely on the continuing inaction of western leaders.

By Jonathan Cook

Shades Of Anger

RAFEEF ZIADAH is a Canadian-Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. Her debut CD Hadeel is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of F16 bombers, who still remember the names if their villages in Palestine and still hear the sound of Hadeel (cooing of doves) over Gaza.

“We Are Trying To Maximize The Number Of Civilian Casualties”

A Dutch television network has aired a fake video of Prime Minister Netanyahu bragging to US Secretary of State Clinton about how many Gaza civilian casualties Israel caused. The video is meant to be ‘satire.’

A Dutch news show has stirred controversy by airing a fake satirical video of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu bragging to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about civilian deaths in Gaza.

“We are trying to maximize the number of civilian casualties. We prefer that,” Netanyahu is seen telling Clinton in the video, which the broadcaster Vara aired on November 21, as part of the satirical corner of the prime-time news show De Wereld Draait Door. Approximately 1.5 million viewers watch the show every evening. 

The video, made to appear genuine through seamless splicing of sound bites from previous speeches by Netanyahu, was spread by thousands of Twitter and Facebook users who advertised it under the headline “Netanyahu finally tells the truth.”

“We are conducting these surgical operations against schools, mosques, hospitals, children,” Netanyahu is heard saying, adding: “This is something I don’t have to explain to Americans.”

Let’s go to the videotape.

 

“We are trying to maximize the number of civilian casualties,” Netanyahu says in a fake satirical video edited to appear genuine. Ultimately, the joke’s on Netanyahu’s supposed constituency, the people of Israel, the IDF, for whom Netanyahu seems incapable of mustering the strength to decimate their enemies.

 

My Notation: This may be satirical, but Israel’s actions and behavior show this to be factual, with regards to not giving a damn about civilian casualties nor caring one iota about what it’s American sponsor thinks or international law.

IRAQ – The Killing Of A Nation

IRAQ – The Killing Of A Nation, is a short documentary that was aired in the House of Commons on the 10th of June 2014 during the “11years after the occupation of Iraq” conference organised by the Arab Lawyers Association UK & Rasam Strategic Studies Institute Turkey. The Conference is part of a series of events designed to extend the reach of Iraqis to the world community.

Western Hypocrisy: Crimea and Israeli War Crimes

The West Hits Russia With Sanctions For Annexing Crimea, But It Has Yet To Punish Israel For War Crimes In Palestine.

The velocity with which the US and EU imposed economic sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea is equal to the mass of hypocrisy on Israel’s creeping annexation of Palestinian land through colonial-settlement expansion. The ongoing expansion is seen as a war crime “falling into the provision of Article 8 of the International Criminal Court statutes”.

Following the overwhelming vote by Crimeans to secede from the Ukraine and join Russia in the rushed referendum on March 16, US President Barack Obama, on March 20, ordered a second round of soft sanctions targeting a list of key Russian officials, businessmen and bankers, sending ripples of instability through Russia’s stock market.

Israel’s Illegal Annexations

When in 1947, the UN grappled with the idea of partitioning Palestine, it was rejected, outright and rightfully, by the Palestinians. Nor were the entire inhabitants under the British mandate granted a referendum, as were the Crimeans, on the matter because the indigenous population far exceeded the Zionist immigrants whom the international community favoured.

So when Israel – unilaterally – declared the state of Israel, after massacring unarmed Palestinian children, women, elderly and men, destroying over 500 villages and forcefully deporting 700,000 terrified Palestinians, the West did not impose economic sanctions nor lift a military finger to redress the grave violations of international law then.

Furthermore, the West ignored Israel’s unilateral annexation, on June 28,1967, of East Jerusalem, including the Old City, that placed its Palestinian residents under Israeli jurisdiction, administration and illegal military occupation as well as ignoring Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

Both annexations have been deemed invalid by many UNSC Resolutions such as 478, 269 and 497 – all rejected by Israel that, 47 years later, relentlessly fuels its annexation drive by the expansion of its settlement colonies.

On March 20, while the Ukrainian crisis unfolded, the Israeli Civil Administration, with Putinesque arrogance, defied the Israeli-Palestinian peace process demand for a settlement freeze, by announcing the approval of more than 2,000 housing units in the illegal West Bank settlements.

Today, there are 121 colonies plus 101 offshoot outposts subsidised by the government of Israel and supported by monies from Jews worldwide through rich Zionist organisations like the apartheid JNF”charity” whose provision of illegal settlement housing and leases on stolen Palestinian lands are “chartered to benefit Jews exclusively”. Moreover, JNF’s racist policies and illegal operations are tax-exempt in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.

Almost half a million illegal colonists reside in the encroaching settlements. They have the right to bear arms and enjoy the impunity to act as government militia under the protection of the Israeli Occupation Forces. Systematic settler oppression includes torching fields, uprooting thousands of fruit and olive trees, damaging property, arson, poisoning sheep, defacing graves and mosques, illegal squatting, water and farmland contamination by diversion of sewerage, throwing sewerage on Palestinian passer-bys, road blocks, attacks on schoolchildren and school buses, intimidations, beatings, shootings, deliberate hit and run, vile verbal abuse, racist and threatening graffiti.

Judaisation Plans

Over the recent months of peace talks, provocative assaults by settler and military activity against the al-Aqsa mosque has heightened fears of Zionist desecration and judaisation of al-Haram al-Sharif, marked for the site of the Jewish Third Temple as demonstrated in the propaganda film featuring Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

Billions of dollars to fund the Third Temple are set aside and ready to literally blast away the Dome of the Rock and the holy al-Aqsa Mosque which are under daily threats by excavations below and above by the Zionist religious and settler zealots impervious to the inevitable repercussion of a Muslim conflagration.

The judaisation of East Jerusalem is fundamental to Israel’s annexation master plan to unite East and West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The relentless coercion and the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian residents is executed by the Israeli government, the Municipality of Jerusalem and Elad, the right-wing settler organisation through the revocation of residency rights, absentee property laws, discriminatory taxation policies, home demolitions, transfer of Palestinian residents,.

In short – ethnic cleansing in direct violation of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons is prohibited.”

Every day, with every brick laid in the colonial settlements, a war crime is committed as Palestine shrinks before the eyes of the world.The very same eyes that have been indifferent to and complicit with 67 years of the longest brutal occupation in modern history have suddenly flared with indignation for the Russian annexation of the Crimea implemented with the blessing of the Crimean people.

Israel’s overt and furtive annexation of Palestine is also the annexation of Palestinian dignity, rights and freedoms. However, it is not only the people of Palestine who are injured by the political hypocrisy of Western leaders, all of us are the losers when international law is cynically and deliberately abused and neglected.

Dr Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was also a convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of t he East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.