Palestine – Features

Netanyahu: I Deceived the US to Destroy Oslo Accords

By Jonathan Cook

(source: CounterPunch)

There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles. To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10.

Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only  Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama. The film was shot, apparently without Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada. At the time  Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join  Sharon’s government as finance minister.

On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999. Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

Read More »Damaging video released

(source: The Hindu.com)

José Luis Gómez del Prado, Chairman of the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, has provided a damning indictment of private military and security companies (PMSCs), the use of which has expanded hugely over the past two decades. In the early 1990s, the DynCorp company was contracted by the United States to air-spray Colombian cocaine plantations, train the national army, and dismantle drug rings.

By the middle of 2010, however, the U.S. Department of Defense had nearly 210,000 mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about 20 per cent more personnel than the regular military. The worldwide U.S. total is about 240,000, with two-thirds of them coming from host countries and third countries. The main companies are American and British; many of their board members have come through the revolving door between high military ranks and the private war business. The industry, minuscule before 2001, now has a value of about $200 billion a year.

Some PMSCs are so notorious that they have changed their names (Blackwater, for instance, now calls itself Xe). In Iraq, they have intensified political instability and public hatred of the occupying forces. Blackwater/Xe may also have been involved in using white phosphorus as a chemical weapon in Fallujah. In Colombia, Washington gave DynCorp immunity from prosecution over long-term diseases, including cancers, caused by its spraying. In Croatia, MPRI company staff cannot be tried for ethnic cleansing (with which many Croatian officers have been charged). In Iraq, the mercenaries have immunity from criminal prosecution.

Read More »The outsourcing of war

Issued By: Muslim Students Association Gauteng

The Muslim Students Association in Gauteng condemns the decision taken by the French government to forbid face coverings (Niqaab) in public, a measure which is aimed specifically at outlawing some 2,000 or so Muslim women from deciding how they dress and conform to their religion.

One is baffled as to how a country that made famous the concepts of ‘liberty’, ‘equality’, and ‘fraternity’, can turn against its founding principles, and impinge on people’s liberty so drastically. More over this proposed ban goes against the universal declaration of human rights which asserts that freedom of religion (by religion, the right to dress according to one’s will is also implied) is an integral and indispensable right.

The Muslim Students Association supports the right of Muslim women to choose to wear the Hijaab without fear of prejudice. It is for this reason that a rally is being held outside the French Embassy in Pretoria, as well as to stop other countries from pursuing similar actions. (Details of the protest can be found at the end of this document)

For more information, please contact Ibrahim Patel at 072 105 0919 or email at Ibs.patel@gmail.com

CONTACT: AMINA 082 7444 335 0R ZAEEM 082 743 1023

The Muslim Student Association (MSA) is a student based society at South African universities nationally. It aims to serve the needs of Muslim students on campus and maintains a considerable interest in community outreach and developmental projects.

Read More »Protest against the French niqaab ban

 Iranian officials have said his election victory on Tuesday showed the American people’s desire for fundamental change in domestic and foreign policy from the policies of Bush.

A senior Iranian official called on U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday to show goodwill and remove sanctions against the Islamic Republic, an Iranian news agency reported.

Obama has said he would harden sanctions but has also held out the possibility of direct talks with the United States to solve issues.

"Through the lifting of the past government’s cruel sanctions against Iran, Barack Obama can demonstrate his goodwill to the Iranian people," Prosecutor-General Ayatollah Qorban-Ali Dori-Najafabadi said.

"Calling for forgiveness and remorse for the past U.S. government’s deeds by the new government can bring about the great Iranian nation’s forgiveness," the Mehr News Agency quoted him as saying in the northwestern city of Tabriz.

The United States cut diplomatic ties with Iran after its Islamic Revolution in 1979 and is spearheading a drive to isolate the country over its nuclear activities.

Tehran says its nuclear enrichment programme aims at produce civilian energy. The West claims Iran’s study is intended to build atomic weapons.

Iranian officials have rejected world powers’ demand that it halt uranium enrichment, a process that can have civilian and military uses, in exchange for trade and other benefits.

Obama, like current U.S. President George W. Bush, has not ruled out military action although he has criticised the outgoing administration for not pushing diplomacy and engagement with Iran.

Iranian officials have said his election victory on Tuesday showed the American people’s desire for fundamental change in domestic and foreign policy from the policies of Bush, who labelled Iran part of an "axis of evil".

The head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission said any change in Iran’s strategy towards Washington would depend on a change in the U.S. approach, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"As long as the U.S. policy toward Iran stays the way it currently is, negotiations with that country will have no meaning," Alaeddin Boroujerdi said in the city of Mashad.

Reuters

Read More »Iranian official urges Obama to endUSsanctions