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The man who would tear down scaffolding of zionism

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The man who would tear down ‘scaffolding’ of Zionism

PATRICK MARTIN 
 
  The Globe and Mail    Canada     December 9, 2008
 
NATAF, ISRAEL — Asked to name the forces that led to the state of Israel, almost every Israeli would say Zionism and the Holocaust.
 
If those same people were asked just a few years ago which Israeli was likely to become prime minister, the name most often given would have been Avraham Burg — son of a prominent rabbi and founder of the country’s National Religious Party, former paratrooper, leading member of the Labour Party, speaker of the Knesset and head of the powerful Jewish Agency.
 
For more than 20 years, Avrum Burg, as he likes to be known, was a pillar of the Israeli establishment.
 
However, four years ago Mr. Burg turned his back on all that and wrote a powerful book, an indictment of how Zionism and the Holocaust have been used.
 

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The wounds of Gaza

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The Wounds of Gaza

Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang

Two Surgeons from the UK, Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang, managed to get into Gaza during the Israeli invasion. Here they describe their experiences,  share their views, and conclude that the people of Gaza are extremely vulnerable and defenseless in the event of another attack.

The wounds of Gaza are deep and multi-layered. Are we talking about the Khan Younis massacre of 5,000  in 1956 or the execution  of 35,000 prisoners of war by Israel in 1967? Yet more wounds of the First Intifada, when civil disobedience by an occupied people against the occupiers resulted in massive wounded and hundreds dead?  We also cannot discount the 5,420 wounded in southern Gaza alone since 2000. Hence what we are referring to below are only that of the invasion as of 27 December 2008,

 

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Resistance book review

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Resistance – Book Review
 

  Hamas fighters pray
‘One main object of the book is to try to explain the essence of the Islamist revolution.’
 

By Ludwig Watzal – Bonn

Alastair Crooke, Resistance. The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, Pluto Press, London 2009.

With the failure of the ‘war on terror’ and the mess into which the Bush administration has led the United States, it is time for the new President Barack Hussein Obama to revise US policy from scratch. All the decisions which Obama has taken regarding Guantanamo (not to speak of Bagram), torture, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, and random surveillance of emails and telephones, have been half-hearted. Obama does not talk constantly about the56anymore, he just keeps on waging it. The new President appears increasingly as a Bush-light version: plenty of rhetoric but hardly any change. “Looking forward” should not be Obama’s sole concern but also “looking back” to assess the damage the Bush-warriors have done to the heart and soul of the United States and to bring the instigators to justice starting from the man in charge, downward. In the ongoing debate on torture Obama has already lost out to former Vice-President Dick Cheney, the person primarily responsible for the whole malaise and the Kafkaesque situation in the country.

Just as important as restoring the rule of law to America and repairing the ruined reputation of his country, is the normalization with the Islamic world. Widespread anti-Muslim obsessions, not only among the ruling elite and the media, but also within the American population, must be repudiated and stigmatized as racist. In his Cairo speech he has pledged to do it. Muslims want to be treated on a par with everybody else. And they want the US to withdraw its occupation forces from Muslim countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Arab peninsula. America’s Muslims doubt about the seriousness and ability of the American political elite to understand and address the real causes of the conflict between the West and the Islamic world.

 

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