Gaza War

The Washington Farce

By Jeffrey Blankfort

(source:  Counterpunch.org)

This coming week we will witness the latest challenge for the man who is arguably the most extraordinary double agent in the Middle East. What is unusual about Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, as he was known when his fellow Palestinians had yet to take his measure, is that most of what he does for his Israeli and US masters he does in plain sight.

To which of the two he is most beholden will be determined during his upcoming visit to Washington for the latest chapter in what has euphemistically been referred to as the “peace process” since it was launched in the aftermath of the Oslo Agreement.  The odds are it will be Israel. In Oslo, it should be recalled, Abbas, as the chief Palestinian negotiator, played Neville Chamberlain for Tel Aviv, agreeing to surrender occupied Palestinian land with a view toward putting a permanent end to Palestinian resistance and, immediately, to the first Intifada.

If any reader still harbors the illusion that Oslo was anything but a sell-out by the Palestinian leadership, Abba’s negotiating counterpart, former Israeli military intelligence chief, Shlomo Gazit, put that notion to rest on the evening of November 17,1993.  When challenged during a speaking engagement at Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco  by an angry questioner who compared the agreement to that signed with Nazi Germany in Munich in 1938, Gazit calmly replied that while he was reluctant to make such comparisons, “if it’s another Munich, we’re the Germans and the Palestinians are the Czechs.”.

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(source: Voice of the Cape Online)

The Medie Review Network has summarily dismissed a news headline in New Age stating that “SA’s al-Qaeda links revealed” which appeared on Tuesday, saying that this was not only misleading, but entirely speculative. According to MRN chairperson, Iqbal Jassat, the article quoting faceless South African and American intelligence sources, “making utterly outrageous and unsubstantiated allegations”.

Among the statements made was the claim that SA was being used as a springboard to infiltrate al-Qaeda-linked operatives into Europe, the UK and the US. It goes on to claim that the infiltration is run by a network of Pakistani citizens who bring in illegal aliens by air via OR Tambo airport or overland through Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho.

“The report is mischievous, misleading and malicious for the rest of its content deals with a deliberate attempt to conflate criminal conduct with a movement widely viewed as an ‘Islamic terror group’. Money laundering and forgery of documents along with human trafficking is criminal,” Jassat stated.

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Israel’s righteous fury and its victims in Gaza
January 04, 2009 By Ilan Pappe
Source: The Electronic Intifada

Ilan Pappe’s ZSpace Page

(2 January 2009) — My visit back home to the Galilee coincided with the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. The state, through its media and with the help of its academia, broadcasted one unanimous voice — even louder than the one heard during the criminal attack against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel is engulfed once more with righteous fury that translates into destructive policies in the Gaza Strip. This appalling self-justification for the inhumanity and impunity is not just annoying, it is a subject worth dwelling on, if one wants to understand the international immunity for the massacre that rages on in Gaza.

It is based first and foremost on sheer lies transmitted with a newspeak reminiscent of darker days in 1930s Europe. Every half an hour a news bulletin on the radio and television describes the victims of Gaza as terrorists and Israel’s massive killings of them as an act of self-defense. Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle, if it is led by Hamas. These are the same scholars who demonized the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an earlier era and delegitimized his Fatah movement during the second Palestinian intifada.

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