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Israeli Aggression

Russia moves to shut down 56 religious groups report

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The daily Gazeta reported today that Russia’s justice ministry plans to "liquidate" 56 religious organisations for failing to inform authorities of their activities.

"There is no community of the Russian Orthodox Church on the list," the Russian newspaper noted in reference to the dominant religion in the country.

Published on the justice ministry’s website, the list includes 56 organisations against which the ministry "plans to lodge requests for liquidation."

The website does not give reasons for the decision but, according to the Gazeta, authorities accuse them of failing to submit annual reports, as required by controversial legislation on non-governmental organisations.

Among the NGOs targeted by the ministry was a branch of the Catholic organisation Caritas International in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk,
and several evangelical and Muslim groups.
  
Sapa-AFP 

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The forgotten un resolution

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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.

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I got bush to shame Rice

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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."

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