Nobel winners call for Israel embargo
A group of Nobel Peace Prize winners, prominent artists and activists has issued a call for an international military boycott… Read More »Nobel winners call for Israel embargo
Israeli Aggression
The forgotten un resolution
By Ghada Karmi – London
Sixty years ago, on 11 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed an important resolution about Israel and the Palestinians. It called on the newly formed Israeli state to repatriate the displaced Palestinians “wishing to live in peace with their neighbours…at the earliest practicable date”, and to compensate them for their losses. A Conciliation Commission was set up to oversee the repatriation of the returnees. Though never implemented and frequently ignored since then, Resolution 194 has haunted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process ever since, and has proved the most insurmountable obstacle in all peace negotiations. It is the legal basis for the ‘right of return’, to which Palestinians have clung for sixty years.
Far from this fundamental plank of the Palestinian cause being protected and preserved, it has been used like a political football between the parties, sometimes to attack, sometimes to defend, and now as something to bargain over. Through this process the discourse about the right of return has become deliberately ambiguous or vague, responding to Israel’s anxieties. To assert, against this background of appeasement, that the right of return is the sine qua non of any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is viewed today as ‘unrealistic’ and old-fashioned, even an obstacle to peace, as if the passage of sixty years had disqualified the Palestinians from entitlement to their homeland. Israel, conversely, shows no such ambiguity in its perennial and unambiguous rejection of the right of return.
I got bush to shame Rice
I got Bush to ‘shame’ Rice
By Ron Kampeas · January 12, 2009
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ehud Olmert reportedly said that he persuaded President Bush to abstain from a U.N. Security Council call for a cease-fire, leaving Condoleezza Rice "shamed."
"She was left shamed," AFP, the French news agency, quoted the Israeli prime minister as telling an audience in Ashkelon on Monday, referring to the U.S. secretary of state. "A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor."
Canada can’t muzzle me
Canada Can’t Muzzle Me
To ban me from the country for my views on Afghanistan is absurd, hypocritical, and in vain
By George Galloway
The Canadian immigration minister Jason Kenney gazetted in the Sun yesterday morning that I was to be excluded from his country because of my views on Afghanistan. That’s the way the rightwing, last-ditch dead-enders of Bushism in Ottawa conduct their business.
Kenney is quite a card. A quick trawl establishes he’s a gay-baiter, gung-ho armchair warrior, with an odd habit of exceeding his immigration brief. Three years ago he attacked the pro-western Lebanese prime minister, Fuad Siniora, for being ungrateful to Canada for its support of Israeli bombardment of his country. Most curiously of all, in 2006 he addressed a rally of the so-called People’s Mujahideen of Iran, a Waco-style cult, banned in the European Union as a terrorist organization. On one level being banned by such a man is like being told to sit up straight by the hunchback of Notre Dame or being lectured on due diligence by Conrad Black. On another, for a Scotsman to be excluded from Canada is like being turned away from the family home.