Palestine – Features

How Isarael bought off uns war crimes probe

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Jonnathan Cook

(source: The Electronic Intifada)

Israel celebrated at the weekend its success at the United Nations in forcing the Palestinians to defer demands that the International Criminal Court investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Israel during its winter assault on the Gaza Strip.

The about-turn, following vigorous lobbying from Israel and the United States, appears to have buried the damning report of Judge Richard Goldstone into the fighting, which killed some 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

Israeli diplomats suggested on Sunday that Washington had promised the Palestinian Authority, in return for delaying an inquiry, that the US would apply "significant pressure" on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to move ahead on a diplomatic process when the US envoy, George Mitchell, arrives in the region tomorrow.

A tale of two city newspapers

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Ghulam Muhammed

As it is, to judge the pulse of the people is a hazardous venture, even with all the high degree of sophistication sold to the gullible by the discredited polling peddlers, the state of editorial confusion in the writers of Mumbai’s two main opinion maker English media, The Times of India and The Indian Express, shows how media uses its power in questionable arbitrary manner, when it comes to Muslim mind. The anniversary of December 6, which is marked by Indian Muslim all over the country as a Black Day; a day when India’s most celebrated secular Constitution was systematically subverted by the two main political parties, joining hands in collusion to demolish the 400 year old historic Babri Masjid at Ayodhya.

Israel america foolish tricks

by MRN
January 1, 2013January 6, 2014

(source: The Guardian UK)

Politics is ultimately about interests. Morals and highfalutin principles have their place, but a more reliable truth is that governments and countries usually act in their own self-interest. Usually. The way Israel greeted the visiting US vice-president, Joe Biden, this week offers an intriguing exception to the rule, a rare instance of a state acting in a way that brings itself almost no benefit and delivers a huge amount of self-inflicted harm.

Instead of embracing Mr Biden, Israel showed him the finger, choosing the very day of his visit to announce the construction of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem. That counts as an in-your-face insult to a US administration that has demanded Israel freeze all settlement activity in the territories conquered in 1967, which include East Jerusalem. Little wonder that President Obama was said to be "incandescent with anger", spending 90 minutes on the phone to his deputy drafting a statement of condemnation rare for its ferocity.

Academic scholarship a missing link at university of pretoria?

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Quraysha Ismail Sooliman

Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Since 2007, Hussein Solomon, a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, has presented papers on Global Jihad and Terrorism in Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic Fundamentalist Ideologies in Africa and most recently, Global Jihad: The South African Front on various academic platforms.

Although at pains to stress that the views represented in the papers are his and not that of the university or the Department of Political Sciences, Solomon enjoys the use and protection of an academic platform under the guise of ‘academic freedom’ to express opinions which are unsubstantiated. What is more troublesome is that he continues to promote spurious opinions under the guise of ‘academic research’ thus giving the impression that UP lacks credible standards for academic research.