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My talk with hamas about peace with Isarael

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My talk with Hamas about peace with Israel

By Helena Cobban

Washington – Since his first days in office, President Obama has defined winning a final peace between Israel and the Palestinians as an urgent US interest.

On Jan. 21 he named former Senate majority leader George Mitchell his envoy to achieve that peace, and Mr. Mitchell has since made four fact-finding trips to the Middle East. But neither has yet said how the administration will grapple with one of the biggest challenges that peace diplomacy faces: the continuing strength of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas.

Hamas has been on the State Department’s "terrorism list" since its founding in 1987. It has steadfastly refused to recognize Israel. But it has also won – and kept – considerable popular support among Palestinians.

 

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Us professor cleared over comparison of Gaza war to holocaust

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U.S. professor cleared over comparison of Gaza war to Holocaust

 By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haarez Correspondent, and The Associated Press

  Haaretz    

 A committee at a California university has cleared a professor who sent an e-mail comparing Israel’s policies in Gaza to the Holocaust. 

Officials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent a letter Wednesday to sociology professor William I. Robinson saying the committee had closed the matter.

 In January, Robinson offended some students and others with an e-mail to his "Sociology of Globalization" class that juxtaposed grisly photos from the Nazi era with a recent Gaza offensive. 

 Jewish groups called the e-mail "hate spam" and claimed Robinson violated university policies barring professors from intimidating students and using campus resources for political reasons.

 A leading pro-Israel student group blasted the move on Wednesday. "[The university] has blurred the lines between education and peddling of propaganda," the L.A.-based Israel advocacy group StandWithUs told Haaretz.

 The affair was exposed by Santa Barbara student Leah Yadegar ? a graduate of the StandWithUs Emerson Fellowship program, which trains students in campuses in "response techniques" to anti-Israel efforts on campus.

 "We are surprised and disappointed that the university chose not to uphold their standards for professional conduct," said Roz Rothstein, director and founder of StandWithUs, which filed the original complaint against Robinson.

 "It is unfortunate that students will continue to be victims of partisan indoctrination and misinformation."

 Robinson, who is Jewish, has said his justified criticism of Israel’s policies should not be confused as anti-Semitism. Before the ruling, he had circulated a petition rallying colleagues and supporters against the internal probe into his actions.

 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1095571.html

 

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Uprising in amazon more urgent than Irans

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The Uprising In The Amazon Is More Urgent Than Iran’s – It Will Determine The Future Of The Planet
In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world

By Johann Hari 

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine. In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

Here’s the story of how it happened – and how we all need to pick up this fight.

Earlier this year, Peru’s President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 percent of his country’s swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon’s trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia’s plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn’t bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are currently facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block 1AB, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".

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