Another Case of Injustice

Judy Andreas

 

February 11, 2007

 

I wonder how many Americans are familiar with Sami Al-Arian and the story of injustice that surrounds this man. I wonder how many Americans are aware that Mr. Al-Arian has spent the past four years in prison.

 

"What has he done?" you ask. I wish I knew the answer. Although Sami Al-Arian was found "not guilty" of the 17 charges against him, the Palestinian Professor and activist remains in jail.

 

"How could that be?" you ask. I wish I knew the answer. Sami Al-Arian was a computer science professor at the University of South Florida. In addition, he was a leading member of the Muslim Community and a prominent activist. (Oh oh. Did someone say "activist?" )

 

In February of 2003, Mr. Al-Arian was arrested. He was accused of being a leader of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He received a 50-count indictment by the "Justice" (?) Department. The indictment was against Al-Arian and seven other men. They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, giving material support to terrorists, perjury, and other offenses.

 

The trial ended in December of 2005. THE JURY FAILED TO RETURN A SINGLE GUILTY VERDICT. Al -Arian was acquitted on eight of seventeen counts against him and the jury was deadlocked on the rest.

 

Four months after the verdict, Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges. He did this in exchange for being released and deported. At his sentencing, however, the judge gave him as much prison time as possible under a plea deal - 57 months.

 

Although the release date was scheduled for April 2007, a little over two weeks ago, a judge found him in contempt. The charge was that he refused, a second time, to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank. Because of this ruling, the date of Mr. Al-Arian's release could now be extended by as much as 18 months. And so, in response, Al-Arian, who is a diabetic, began a hunger strike.

 

In an interview from Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, Sami Al-Arian stated that he is being held on contempt charges.

 

On January 22nd, he began his hunger strike. He stated the reason for the strike:

 

"I believe that freedom and human dignity are more precious than life itself. In essence, I'm taking a principled stand, that I'm willing to endure whatever it takes to win my freedom. I'm also protesting the continuous harassment campaign by the government against me because of my political beliefs. This campaign was supposed to have ended when we concluded the plea deal last year, but unfortunately it hasn't... After two-and-a-half years in pretrial detention with Guantanamo-like conditions, mostly under 23-hour lockdowns, followed by a six-month trial with eighty witnesses, including twenty-one from Israel, thousands of documents, phone interceptions, physical surveillance, websites, hearsay evidence, anything and everything they could think of, preceded by twelve years of investigations, tens of millions of dollars, some even say over $80 million spent on this investigation, with ninety-four charges against me and my co-defendants and with my defense only being four words -- 'I rest my case' -- how did the jury see it? They gave them zero convictions. Unfortunately, however, the judge stopped the deliberations, because of a distressed juror, and they ended up with some hung counts, although they were mostly ten-to-two in my favor. What happened was that the government had the power to retry me on these hung counts. My attorneys had prior commitments and would have left, which meant I probably would have to hire a new legal team and wait perhaps for another year or more for a new trial."
Sami Al-Arian was told that he sponsored a researcher in 1994 and '95 to come to the United States to conduct research and edit a magazine. He was told that he wasn't candid or forthcoming when interviewed by a journalist in November '95.

 

"I was told that I helped my brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najiar, to get out of prison when he was detained on secret evidence between '97 and 2000. My main concern with this deal was that the judge got out of hand, because association is constitutionally protected. And everyone kept saying that this was just a face-saving way for the government to end this, and no one was going to object. And, indeed, no one did....Now, they want me to testify before a grand jury in Virginia. We believe that this is either a perjury or contempt trap. Back in August of 2000, I was also subpoenaed before an immigration court, and I was asked if I believe in the freedom of Islam through violence. My answer was one word: no. But this was nonetheless one of the counts against me, which the jury acquitted me of. Now, I have been held in contempt for over a month last year, and then that grand jury expired. Then they reconvened another grand jury this year, and I have been held now in contempt since January 22nd. That's why I'm on a hunger strike."

 

There is an ongoing investigation of some of the think tanks and charities in Virginia and they want to ask Sami about them. He states that he hasn't had any relationship with any of these since '92 or '93, but he believes that this is just a pretext to hold him either in contempt or charge him with perjury.

 

" Whatever I say, they are going to tell me that am lying"

 

Sami has been told that on civil contempt charges, it is really in the hands of the judge who has the power to lift this tomorrow, if he wants to. It is not supposed to be punishment. It's supposed to be coercion. It can go for six months, renewed two more times, which brings it up to eighteen months. And after that, the government can even charge him with criminal contempt. And so, it could go on for years and years.

 

Al-Arian states "I think it's politically motivated, so this might very well be the case. "

 

On September 2001, Al-Arian had been invited to be a guest on "The O'Reilly Factor". He was given the impression that the purpose of the interview was to discuss Arab-American reactions to 9/11. After all, Sami Al-Arian was a prominent member of the Muslim community in south Florida as well as a leading Palestinian academic and activist. ( Perhaps Al-Arian was unfamiliar with the tactics of Shill O'Reilly) True to form, O'Reilly used the interview time to accuse Al-Arian of supporting terrorism and concluded by saying "If I was the C.I.A., I'd follow you wherever you went."

 

The day after the interview, the University of South Florida, where Al-Arian worked, received hundreds of threatening letters and emails. I cannot help but wonder if actual individuals wrote that barrage of letters. Could it be that so many people are fooled by O'Reilly ?

 

Thirty six hours after the interview, the University put Sami Al-Arian on paid leave. A year and a half later, he was arrested.

 

The story of Sami Al-Arian is not over. This is a story that extends far beyond the walls of the prison in Virginia. This is a story that touches more than just the lives of the family and community in which Sami Al-Arian resided. This is a story of injustice. This is a story that touches us all.

 

As you sit down to your dinner tonight, take some time to reflect on what is happening to freedom and dignity in the United States of America.

 

" I believe that freedom and human dignity are more precious than life itself. In essence, I'm taking a principled stand, that I'm willing to endure whatever it takes to win my freedom. I'm also protesting the continuous harassment campaign by the government against me because of my political beliefs." SAMI AL-ARIAN

 

www.judyandreas.com

 

- JUDE10901@AOL.COM

 

www.uruknet.info?p=30564

An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11

By SUE REID

 

Daily Mail   9th February 2007

 

The official story of what happened on 9/11 never fails to shock. Four American airliners are hijacked by Osama Bin Laden's terrorists in an attack on the heart of the Western world on September 11, 2001.

 

Two are deliberately flown into New York's famous Twin Towers, which collapse. A third rams into the United States defence headquarters at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C.

 

The last goes down in rural Pennsylvania, 150 miles north of the capital, after a tussle between the hijackers and some of the passengers onboard, whose bravery was recently portrayed in a Hollywood film, United 93.

 

Nearly 3,000 ordinary, decent Americans die in the attacks, provoking the U.S. President George W. Bush to mount a global war on terror, which leads to the invasion of Iraq, with Britain in tow.

 

Or that's how the official story goes.

 

Yet today, more than five years on, this accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie made for £1,500 on a cheap laptop by three young American men. The film is so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched what is being dubbed the first internet blockbuster.

 

The movie was shown on television to 50 million people in 12 countries on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 last autumn. More than 100,000 DVDs have been sold and another 50,000 have been given away. In Britain, 491,000 people have clicked on to Google Video to watch it on their computers.

 

Called Loose Change, the film is a blitz of statistics, photographs pinched from the web, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, all set to hip-hop music. And it is dramatically changing the way people think about 9/11.

 

A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story of an Al Qaeda attack.

 

The video claims the Bush administration was, at the very least, criminally negligent in allowing the terrorist attacks to take place. It also makes the startling claim that the U.S. government might have been directly responsible for 9/11 and is now orchestrating a cover-up.

 

Unsurprisingly, the film's allegations have been denied, even roundly condemned, by White House sources and U.S. intelligence services.

 

Only this week, the letters page of the Guardian newspaper was full of discourse about Loose Change, which was made by a trio of twentysomethings, including a failed film school student and a disillusioned ex-soldier.

 

Indeed, the movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain - including the former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher - who are questioning the official account of 9/11.

 

Mr Meacher, who last year proposed holding a screening of Loose Change at the House of Commons (he later changed his mind), has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. Some of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis."

 

These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour (a pointed reference to the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to assault the U.S. fleet in 1941, in order to force America into World War II).

 

Griffin, now nearing retirement, is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. While Loose Change is capturing the interest of internet devotees, Professor Griffin's equally contentious theories are receiving standing ovations in book clubs across the U.S.

 

Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: could the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by President Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro?

 

In other words, on a fateful September morning in 2001, did America fabricate an outrage against civilians to fool the world and provide a pretext for war on Al Qaeda and Iraq?

 

This, and other deeply disturbing questions, are now being furiously debated on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Why were no military aircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? Was the collapse of the Twin Towers caused by a careful use of explosives? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pentagon? And who made millions of dollars by accurately betting that shares in United and American Airlines, owners of the four doomed aircraft, were going to fall on 9/11 as they duly did?

 

An extremely high volume of bets on the price of shares dropping were placed on these two airline companies, and only these two. In the three days prior to the catastrophe, trade in their shares went up 1,200 per cent.

 

Initially, like most people in America, Professor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job.

 

It was only a year later, when he was writing a special chapter on American imperialism and 9/11 for his latest academic tome, that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's events based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he changed his mind.

 

And one of the most puzzling anomalies that he studied was that none of the hijacked planes was intercepted by fighter jets, even though there was plenty of time to do so and it would have been standard emergency procedure in response to a suspected terrorist attack.

 

Indeed, it is mandatory procedure in the U.S. if there is any suspicion of an air hijack. In the nine months before 9/11, the procedure had been implemented 67 times in America.

 

Readers of The New Pearl Harbour and viewers of Loose Change are reminded that it was 7.59am when American Airlines Flight 11 left Boston. Fifteen minutes later, at 8.14am, radio contact between the pilot and air traffic control stopped suddenly, providing the first indication that the plane might have been hijacked.

 

Flight 11 should have been immediately intercepted by fighter pilots sent up from the nearby McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. They could have made the journey to the World Trade Centre in three minutes.

 

But, surprisingly, F-15 fighter jets were instead ordered out of an airbase 180 miles away at Cape Cod. They appear to have flown so slowly - at 700mph, instead of their top speed of 1,850mph - that they did not arrive in time to stop the second attack, on the South Tower of the World Trade Centre. They were 11 minutes too late.

 

And this is not the only worrying question. Incredibly, the attack on the Pentagon was not prevented either. The defence headquarters was hit by the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 at 9.38am. But fighter jets from Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles from Washington, weren't scrambled to intercept it.

 

Instead, jets were ordered from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, 100 miles away. By the time they arrived, Flight 77 had already hit the Pentagon.

 

So what of the fall of the Twin Towers?

 

The official version is that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the heat from the fuel fires of the two crashed planes.

 

It is a mantra that has been repeated in White House briefings, official inquiries into 9/11, leaks by the American intelligence services and almost every TV documentary on the attack in the U.S. and Britain.

 

But, according to the allegations of Loose Change (which are endorsed by Professor Griffin), the science does not stand up. Steel does not begin to melt until it reaches around 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, but open fires of jet fuel - such as those in the Twin Towers inferno - cannot rise above 1,700 degrees.

 

Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change are convinced the Twin Towers were deliberately blown up.

 

The film shows clip after clip of the towers coming down in one fell swoop to loud and distinct booms. Were they the sound of detonators being set off?

 

And the Pentagon attack? The hotly disputed theory of the film and Professor Griffin is that a passenger plane never hit the building at all.

 

The terrorist pilot, Hani Hanjour, was so slow to learn the fundamentals at flight school that his tutors reported him to the authorities for his incompetence five times.

 

How could he have guided the huge aircraft in such a complex manoeuvre into the building? And if he did, what happened to the aircraft?

 

The Loose Change narrator says: "The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vapourised the entire plane. Indeed, from the pictures, it seems there was no discernible trace of a fully loaded Boeing 757 at the crash scene.

 

"But if the fire was hot enough to incinerate a jumbo jet, then how could investigators identify 184 out of 189 dead people found at the defence headquarters?"

 

Intriguingly, the narrator adds: "The only visible damage to the outer wall of the Pentagon is a single hole no more than 16ft in diameter. But a Boeing 757 is 155ft long, 44ft high, has a 124ft wingspan and weighs almost 100 tons.

 

"Are we supposed to believe that it disappeared into this hole without leaving any wreckage on the outside? Why is there no damage from the wings or the vertical stabiliser or the engines which would have slammed into the building?

 

"Remember how big the engines were," the film adds persuasively.

 

"If six tons of steel and titanium banged into the Pentagon at 530mph, they would bury themselves inside the building, leaving two very distinct imprints. And yet the only damage to the outer wall is this single hole."

 

And what of the Boeing's 40ft high tail? "Did it obligingly duck before entering the building?" asks Professor Griffin.

 

So if a commercial aircraft did not hit the building, what did? The wildest of all the theories in Professor Griffin's writings - echoed in Loose Change - is that the Pentagon was attacked by a military missile of some kind. Certainly, several onlookers quoted in the film claim that they saw a tiny aircraft piercing the defence HQ.

 

Another witness says it made a shrill noise, quite unlike a giant passenger plane.

 

So if it wasn't hijacked and flown by a terrorist into the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77, last heard of on its way to Ohio?

 

No one knows. But one thing is sure, asserts Professor Griffin. Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice- President, and Condoleezza Rice, at the time President Bush's national security adviser, were in the White House bunker as the drama unfolded.

 

They, and their advisers, knew a hijacked aircraft was heading towards Washington. The obvious target was the White House, not the Pentagon. Yet Cheney and Rice were never evacuated from the White House. Did someone in high places already know that they were safe and that it was the Pentagon that was going to be the target?

 

Of course, no account of 9/11 by the conspiracy lobby is complete without a minute-by-minute observation of President Bush's behaviour.

 

He was hundreds of miles away in Florida, about to read a book to primary school children when the worst terrorist attack of the modern age happened.

 

The President reportedly showed little reaction when an aide told him that the first plane had crashed into the Twin Towers. Why not?

 

He, apparently, told the school's principal: "A commercial plane has hit the World Trade Centre, but we're going ahead with the reading thing anyway."

 

Then President Bush, who is also the commander-in-chief of the American military, settled down to recite My Pet Goat to a group of seven-year-olds.

 

He was interrupted a few minutes later by a whispered message in his ear from an aide that a second aircraft had hit the Twin Towers.

 

The President's face, captured by photographers at the school, remained completely passive. He showed no sign of emotion.

 

Now it must have been obvious a terrorist maelstrom was being unleashed on his country. But three days later, back in the American capital, he was a different man. By now he was certain that Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen were to blame.

 

Surrounded by the Christian evangelist preacher Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi and an imam, the President delivered a sermon in America's national cathedral in Washington.

 

The words he uttered are recounted by both Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change.

 

President Bush announced: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks waged against us by stealth, deceit and murder and rid the world of evil."

 

The scene had been swiftly set for the West's war on terror.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=435265&in_page_id=1811

The new Jewish question

 

A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over the rights and wrongs of criticising Israel. At its centre is a British historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about Israel. His opponents say his views give succour to anti-Semites. One thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been shattered.

 

Gaby Wood

The Observer    Sunday February 11, 2007

On 3 October last year, the distinguished British-born historian Tony Judt was preparing for a public lecture when the telephone rang. He was due to give the talk, entitled 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy', at the Polish consulate in New York in less than an hour. The caterers were already there. But when he picked up the phone he was informed that his lecture had been suddenly cancelled.

 

He was also told that Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was on the phone to the Polish consul. Whether the call from the ADL was the cause of the cancellation would become the subject of heated debate in the days and months to come. Foxman labelled such accusations 'conspiratorial nonsense'; however, the Polish consul, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, later acknowledged that he had been contacted by a number of Jewish groups - including the ADL and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) - who were concerned about Judt's anti-Israel message.

 

'The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,' Kasprzyk said. It didn't take him long to see how it might look for Poland, given its history, to be fostering arguments that in certain spheres of American intellectual life have been conflated with anti-Semitism.

 

'They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to do in late Communist society,' Tony Judt says of the ADL when I speak to him from his home in New York. 'They point out how foolish it is to associate with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: Did you know that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or giving comfort to anti-Semites?'

 

In the New York Jewish press, the episode was dubbed - with a debatable degree of sarcasm - 'l'Affaire Judt'. Certainly, not everyone felt Judt was a latter-day Dreyfus. The New York Review of Books published an open letter to Abraham Foxman in Judt's defence, which was signed by 114 intellectuals, many of whom disagreed with Judt on the Middle East yet felt that his right to free speech had been indefensibly curbed. But Christopher Hitchens, reminiscing about an occasion when a talk of his own was cancelled for similar reasons, cried out: 'What a chance I missed to call attention to myself!' - not the sort of opportunity Hitchens is in the habit of passing up - 'Once again, absolutely conventional attacks on Israeli and US policy are presented as heroically original.'

 

In the past two weeks, the Judt Affair has entered an entirely new gear. In an essay written by the Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld and published by the American Jewish Committee, Judt's views - and those of other 'progressive Jews' such as the American playwright Tony Kushner and the British academic Jacqueline Rose - were expressly linked to anti-Semitism. That row was reported in the New York Times, giving it an unprecedented prominence, and since then the story has opened the floodgates of a debate that until now has been shrouded in fear. Americans have long been in the grip of a cultural taboo that is characterised by Judt as follows: 'All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject.'

 

Philip Weiss, a bold polemicist whose New York Observer blog, MondoWeiss, has been besieged by posts on the subject since he addressed it last week, has even gone so far as to declare a new movement. His account of it embraces the new forum for dissent, Independent Jewish Voices, which was launched in Britain last week by an eminent group that includes Eric Hobsbawm and Harold Pinter. In launching its manifesto, Independent Jewish Voices has taken the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an occasion to create 'a climate and a space in which Jews of different affiliations and persuasions can express their opinions about the actions of the Israeli government without being accused of disloyalty or being dismissed as self-hating.' One of its founding principles is: 'The battle against anti-Semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-Semitic.'

 

'A lot of people, like Tony Judt, have been doing brave work here in the US for a while,' Weiss tells me. 'What has happened specifically is that for once, the mainstream is paying attention.'

 

He dates the beginning of this back to last March, when an explosive article about the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy, written by two American political scientists, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, was published in the London Review of Books (having originally been turned down by the Atlantic Monthly). The response to the piece was so overwhelming - and so coloured by accusations of anti-Semitism - that the LRB decided to host a debate on the subject in New York last September. That debate was sold out; Tony Judt, one of the speakers, gave an exceptionally eloquent performance, in the course of which he said it was significant that the event had been hosted by a London publication. Public conversation on the issue had been so absent in America, he suggested, that it could only be opened up by importation.

 

'When Walt and Mearsheimer were published in London,' Philip Weiss continues, 'I said: something's changing.' Since then, the publication of former president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and the attention given to Rosenfeld's accusations in his AJC article, have proved, in Weiss's view, that 'there's no question that something has changed. One of the excitements of what's going on right now is that people who have had feelings about this and have not expressed them are popping up all over. It's personally very stirring to me that this is happening. I can't believe it.'

 

In fact, the debate is so current that the online magazine Slate has come up with a quiz entitled 'Are You A Liberal Anti-Semite?' (Sample question: 'Which state's offences against humanity bother you most? a) Sudan b) Israel c) Massachusetts'.) One of the prizes is dinner with Tony Judt.

 

Tony Judt is, in the words of a fellow historian, 'one of our most dazzling public intellectuals'. As a prominent professor at New York University and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and The Nation, he has a strong and widely heard voice. His latest book, Postwar - a magnificent, opinionated and vast history of Europe since 1945 - was voted one of the 10 best books of last year by the New York Times. A talented forger of links between thinkers from countries all over the world, Judt worked tirelessly after 1989 to bring together eastern European and American intellectuals, and he solidified these efforts by founding the Remarque Institute at NYU in 1995 to promote the study and discussion of Europe in America. A natural polemicist, he brought with him to New York an Oxbridge tradition more pugnacious than is generally characteristic of American academic life, and found himself - after years spent concentrating on European history - drawn back into an engagement with the Middle East.

 

In 2003, Judt wrote an articulately provocative piece for the New York Review of Books entitled 'Israel: The Alternative', in which he argued, among other things, that Israel was 'an anachronism' that was 'bad for the Jews' and should be converted into a binational state. The offices of the New York Review were inundated with letters as a result. Last year, Judt wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he argued that America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel wrought tremendous damage. As the page was about to go to press, the editor rang him up. 'Just one thing,' he said, 'You are Jewish, aren't you?'

 

Judt was born in London in 1948. Growing up Jewish in 1950s Britain, as he has said, he came to know a thing or two about anti-Semitism. His mother was from London and his father, who was born in Belgium, had come there as a stateless person. Judt was brought up in what he describes as 'a fairly standard left-wing Jewish secular political environment', but with close links to his Yiddish-speaking grandparents, all of whom were eastern European Jews, from Romania and Russia and Lithuania and Poland. As a teenager, he joined a left-wing Zionist organisation and became very active in the kibbutz movement, living in Israel on and off for a large part of the early 1960s.

 

'What changed for me,' he says now, 'was that in 1967 I went out as a volunteer at the time of the Six Day War; after the war was finished I volunteered for auxiliary military service and I ended up as a sort of informal translator for other volunteers up on the Golan Heights. And there for the first time I began to see another face of Israel that had been camouflaged from me by my enthusiasm for the idealism of the kibbutz movement.' He became, he recalls, quickly very detached from Israel. 'And in fact when I was a student in Paris I became involved in 1970 with Palestinians and young Israelis, trying to organise groups to talk about peace settlements and ending the conflict.'

 

Last week, as he looked over the list of signatories of the new British network, Independent Jewish Voices, Judt says he was struck by how many of them are people who have not in the past identified themselves publicly as Jewish. 'Of course they're Jewish,' he clarifies, 'but it was not part of their public identity tag. And now they feel - and I would share this sentiment - a need to say, look: if it helps you understand just how bad things have got in the Middle East, I am willing to act not as a freestanding historian but as a Jew. I don't normally like to act as though being Jewish was who I am, but it's a kind of inverse moral blackmail that forces you to go the other way.'

 

Speaking from Bloomington, Indiana, where he is a director of Indiana University's Jewish Studies Program, Alvin Rosenfeld tells me that his essay 'does seem to have struck a raw nerve'. 'I've been accused of wanting to shut down debate and stifle free speech,' he says, 'and none of that is true. I stand strongly for vigorous debate and open discussion. What in the past was said behind the hands and on the margins of society has been coming into the mainstream of discourse,' Rosenfeld adds, echoing the sentiments of those he attacks, 'Now one can deal with it. And that's one of the things I set out to do.'

 

Though Rosenfeld is careful not to say in his essay that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are identical, he does state that 'Anti-Zionism is the form that much of today's anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present-day desires to get rid of the Jewish state.' He labels the work of Judt, Rose, Kushner et al 'This Jewish war against the Jewish state.' I ask him if he would say that an increase in anti-Zionist sentiment might be caused by Israeli policy. 'I doubt it,' he replies. 'As I read these people, it strikes to the heart, not of particular policies, but the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East. I think it goes to the question of Israel's origins and essence.'

 

'Oh that's nuts,' Judt counters, 'I've never said Israel doesn't have a right to exist. I'm not actually sure that anyone in what we would call the respectable political mainstream ever has.'

 

'He says that,' says Rosenfeld, 'but it's not true. In his writings he calls not for a two-state solution but for the dissolution of the state of Israel and a one-state solution, and everyone knows that in no time at all, were such a scenario to come about, Jews would be a minority within this newly configured state, and would be at the mercy of a population that's not likely to treat them gently. Tony Judt is a kind of political fantasist, it strikes me.'

 

'The issue is not whether Israel has a right to exist,' Judt says plainly, 'Israel does exist. It exists just like Belgium or Kuwait or any other country which was invented at some point in the past and is now a fact. The question is what kind of a state Israel should be. That's all.'

 

Anti-Zionism has, like Zionism itself, a long and complicated history. 'The thing that we tend to forget,' Judt explains, 'is that until the Second World War, Zionism was a minority taste even within Jewish political organisations. The main body of European Jews was either apolitical or integrated, and voting within the existing countries they lived in. So to be anti-Zionist, at least until the late 1930s, was to be lined up with most Jews. It would make no sense to think of it as anti-Semitic.

 

'After the Second World War, for a fairly brief period - from let's say 1945 to about 1953 - the overwhelming majority of Jews who were politically thinking were Zionists, either actively or sympathetically, for the rather obvious reason that Israel was the only hope for Jewish survivors. But then many of them, like Hannah Arendt or Arthur Koestler, both of whom were Zionists at various points, took their distance, on the grounds that it was already clear to them that Israel was going to become the kind of state that as a cosmopolitan Jew they couldn't identify with.

 

'Ever since then, there has been an unbroken tradition of non-Israeli Jews who regard Israel as either unrelated to their own identity or something of which they sometimes approve, sometimes disapprove, sometimes totally dislike. This range of opinion is not new,' Judt concludes. 'The only thing that's new - and it's a product of the post-Sixties - is the insistence that it's anti-Semitic.'

 

Judt tells a story about an Israeli journalist who was in Washington in the 1960s. 'The Israeli ambassador was retiring, and the journalist asked him what he thought was his biggest achievement. The ambassador said: "I've succeeded in beginning to convince Americans that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism." There has been a progressive emergence of a conflation,' Judt explains. 'It didn't just happen naturally. And it was pushed quite actively in the Seventies and Eighties, to the point at which it became so normal in this country that it was for a while the default assumption. It's really only in the last five to eight years that it's started to be questioned.'

 

The actions of very pro-Israel Jewish organisations - for instance, making carefully placed phone calls relating to certain public speakers - are, Judt believes, now born of panic rather than confidence.

 

'They've lost control of the debate,' he says. 'For a long time all they had to deal with were people like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky, who they could dismiss as loonies of the left. Now they're having to face, for want of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and certainly not on the crazy left on most issues, saying very critical things about Israel. They're not used to that, so their initial response has been to silence people if they could, and their second response has been to ratchet up the anti-Semitic charge.' Judt thinks it's telling that the New York Times 'is willing to report these issues and let reporters quote both sides. In the past, you would have had silence.'

 

Whether this will have any effect in Washington is another matter. The political influence of AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobby, American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is as strong as it ever was, and Judt argues that since it's not worth going out on a limb on Israel from Congressmen's point of view, change has to happen at a presidential level. Hillary, he says, 'is pretty gutless on this'; she has already given two gung-ho speeches to AIPAC. It's not a topic Barack Obama has yet picked up on, Judt adds, but Obama was brave enough to oppose the Iraq war from the outset, so it's possible that he would take a courageous stance elsewhere in the Middle East. 'A presidential candidate has to feel that once he or she gets into office - they wouldn't dare open their mouths while they're running for election - they don't stand to lose very much in public opinion if they put pressure on Israel,' Judt says

 

In Postwar, Judt writes of Europe that 'After 1989, nothing - not the future, not the present and above all not the past - would ever be the same.' Is there a moment like that, I ask him, in this situation? 'I think so,' he replies. 'It's not as tidy a moment as 1989 in Europe. But I think one could say that after the Iraq war, for want of a better defining moment, the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East was broken. The shell broke and conversation - however uncomfortable, however much slandered - became possible. I'm not sure that will change things in the Middle East, but it's changed the shape of things here. Even five years ago, I don't think it would have looked the way it does now.'

 

He sounds almost optimistic.

 

'Well,' he sighs, 'I do my best.'

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,2010302,00.html

Gideon Levy : Tair's Palestinian peers

Haaretz  Mon., February 12, 2007

A child a week, almost every week. In recent weeks, I again went out to document the circumstances of the killing of several children and teenagers, shot dead by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. A very ill wind is once again blowing in the army and no one is saying anything about it. An army that kills children does not concern the public. No committee of inquiry has been, and none will be, formed to deal with this matter. But the fact that the IDF kills children with such a light hand, and fully supports its soldiers who do so, should trouble us no less than the reserves of war supplies in the North. The ramifications of such behavior are not only moral - ultimately an army's operational capability will be affected when children are the targets in its soldiers' gunsights.

 

Jamil Jibji, the boy from the Askar camp who loved horses, was shot in the head after soldiers in an armored jeep taunted a group of children who threw rocks at them. He was 14 years old. Jamil was the fourth child to be shot in that area under similar circumstances. Abir, the daughter of Bassam Aramin, a member of the "Combatants for Peace" organization, was leaving her school in Anata when a Border Police patrol jeep turned around near the school - no one knows why - and tossed tear gas grenades, one of which apparently struck her head. She was 11 years old. Taha al-Jawi touched the fence nearby the abandoned airfield at Atarot and in response, soldiers fired at his legs with live ammunition, and apparently left him to bleed to death. He was the eighth child to die in similar circumstances. He was not yet 17 years old.

 

All of these children were killed in cold blood; they did not pose a threat to anyone's life. With the exception of Jamil's case, the IDF, as usual, did not even bother to open an investigation into these children's circumstances of death. When it doesn't even investigate, it is obvious that the army has no intention of putting an end to the killing of children. Its commanders are not even troubled by this.

 

The last case, Taha, is perhaps the most egregious of all: The IDF Spokesman's Office defends the decision to open fire with live ammunition against a group of children who perhaps damaged a barbed wire fence, as the IDF claims, or perhaps played soccer near the fence, as the children claim - all in broad daylight. Not a word of sorrow, not a word of condemnation, only absolute backing for live gunfire from a distance at unarmed children, without issuing a prior warning. Taha died from a bullet in his leg. And, according to his friends, he bled for a full hour in a muddy ditch he fell into. The IDF Spokesman's contention that he received immediate medical attention does not reconcile with the fact that Taha was wounded in his leg, an injury, which is only fatal as a result of a prolonged loss of blood. But even if assistance was extended immediately, as the IDF claims, are we willing to accept rules of engagement that permit live gunfire from a distance at unarmed teenagers? Are there no other means of dispersing "suspicious" teenagers, as the IDF Spokesman refers to them? What goes through the mind of a soldier who aims his weapon at such a group and fires live, fatal rounds at them, taking such young lives? And what chilling message is the IDF sending its soldiers when it backs such inhumane action?

 

These stories, and similar ones, did not raise a stir among us. Some of them were not even reported in the news. The killing of a Palestinian boy or girl does not disturb the Israeli public. The West Bank is quiet, there are almost no terror attacks, attention is turned to other affairs, and under the cover of this false and temporary quiet our soldiers, our best sons, are killing dozens of children and teenagers on a routine basis, out of the sight of the rest of us.

 

The horrible murder of Tair Rada in Katzrin justifiably shook the country. She was an innocent child, 13 years old, murdered at her school with satanic brutality. What is the difference between the murder of Tair and the killing of Abir, also at the entrance to her school? The difference between Tair and Abir consists of the fact that Abir was Palestinian and Tair was Israeli. Israeli? Taha also carried an Israeli identity card. But he was a Palestinian. Can someone seriously argue that the soldier who aimed at Jamil's head did not intend to kill him? The bereavement is the same bereavement; the horror is the same horror. Just as Tair was the joy of her parents' life, so was Abir - a small girl who wanted to be an engineer when she grew up. But while there are still doubts concerning the identity of Tair's murderer, it is very easy to identify the killers of Taha, Jamil and Abir. We do not even denounce them; they receive automatic immunity, without investigation. "The mark of Cain will not sprout on a soldier who fires at the head of a child, on the mound of dirt by the fence of a refugee camp," Aharon Shabtai wrote once in his poem "Culture."

 

Thus, our soldiers have killed 815 children and teenagers during the last seven years. The entire array of justifications for killing over 3,000 adults during the same period of time, which is also horrifying in its scope, collapses when it comes to children. Someone should listen to the emotional cry of the bereaved father from Anata, who said he is not going to lose his head because of the fact that he has lost his heart: "I don't want to take revenge. My revenge will be that this 'hero,' who was 'threatened' by my daughter and shot her, will stand trial. They send an 18-year-old boy with an M-16 and tell him that our children are his enemy, and he knows that no one will be brought to trial, and therefore he fires in cold blood and becomes a murderer." He says all this in his fluent Hebrew, which has improved during the course of his lectures throughout Israel about the need for peace.

 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=824137

"NYT" Reporter Who Got Iraqi WMDs Wrong Now Highlights Iran Claims

By Greg Mitchell
   

 Editor & Publisher    Saturday 10 February 2007

 

    New York - Saturday's New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the "deadliest weapon aimed at American troops" in Iraq. The author notes, "Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile."

 

    What is the source of this volatile information? Nothing less than "civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies."

 

    Sound pretty convincing? It may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

 

    Gordon wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized - even by the Times itself - WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, "aluminum tubes" story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows.

 

    When the Times eventually carried an editors' note that admitted some of its Iraq coverage was wrong and/or overblown, it criticized two Miller-Gordon stories, and
noted that the Sept. 8, 2002, article on page one of the newspaper "gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program."

 

    This, of course, proved bogus.

 

    The Times "mea-culpa" story dryly observed: "The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes," adding, "The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times article." This was the famous "mushroom cloud" over America article.

 

    Now, more than four years later, Gordon reveals: "The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad."

 

    Gordon also wrote, following Secretary of State Colin Powell's crucial, and appallingly wrong, speech to the United Nations in 2003 that helped sell the war, that "it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington's case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information."

 

    Today, in contrast to the Times' report, Dafna Linzer in The Washington Post simply notes, "Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said serial numbers and markings on some explosives used in Iraq indicate that the material came from Iran, but he offered no evidence."

 

    For some perspective, here is how that "mushroom cloud" Gordon-Miller story of Sept. 8, 2002, opened:

 

    "More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.

 

    "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.

 

    "The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.

 

    "The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.

 

    "Iraq's nuclear program is not Washington's only concern. An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks....

 

    "'The jewel in the crown is nuclear," a senior administration official said. 'The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical or biological weapons. Nuclear weapons are his hole card. The question is not, why now?' the official added, referring to a potential military campaign to oust Mr. Hussein. 'The question is why waiting is better. The closer Saddam Hussein gets to a nuclear weapon, the harder he will be to deal with.'

 

    "Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq's nuclear program before Baghdad's defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."

 

    Last month, Byron Calame, public editor at The New York Times, and the paper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, agreed that Gordon had stepped over the journalistic line in a recent TV appearance by starkly backing the "surge" in Iraq. Gordon had said, "So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it's worth one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we've never really tried to win. We've simply been managing our way to defeat."

 

    --------

 

    The Washington Post joined in on Sunday in trumpeting the Iran weapons charge.

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021207L.shtml

Queen Rania says Muslim women don't have to wear veils

Queen of Jordan says wearing veil is free personal choice, main enemy is not extremism, but ignorance.

 

Middle East Online   2007-02-09,

ROME - Islam does not require women to wear veils, Queen Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan said in an interview published Friday, calling on Muslim moderates to "make their voices be heard."

"Islam neither requires one to be practising, nor to dress in one way or another," the stylish 36-year-old queen told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera during a visit to Rome.

"So imposing the veil on a woman is contrary to the principles of Islam," said Queen Rania, who is in Rome for the launch of a Group of Seven (G7) programme to develop vaccines against diseases that are endemic in poor countries.

"Unfortunately, after all the suspicion weighing on Islam, many people have begun to consider the veil as a political problem, but this is not the case," she told Corriere. "Wearing the veil is a free personal choice."

Queen Rania urged "all moderates to stand up and let their voices be heard."

She added: "Many people are frustrated in the Arab world. Many give in to the anger because they are accused of violence. But instead we should get up, explain who we are and what we believe in.

"Over the last three years, most victims of terrorism have been Muslim. So there's not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between extremists and moderates of all the religions," the queen said.

"What is important is not to live in fear. The most dangerous (thing to do) is to give up and lose hope. The main enemy is not terrorism or extremism, but ignorance," she said.

 

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=19501

Australian leader: Al-Qaeda wants Obama

USA TODAY        2/11/2007

 

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Australia's conservative prime minister slammed Barack Obama on Sunday over his opposition to the Iraq war, a day after the first-term U.S. senator announced his intention to run for the White House in 2008.

 

Obama said Saturday at his campaign kickoff in Springfield, Ill., that one of the country's first priorities should be ending the war in Iraq. He has also introduced a bill in the Senate to prevent President Bush from increasing American troop levels in Iraq and to remove U.S. combat forces from the country by March 31, 2008.

 

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch Bush ally who has sent troops to Iraq and faces his own re-election bid later this year, said Obama's proposals would spell disaster for the Middle East.

 

"I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Howard said on Nine Network television.

 

"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

 

Howard has defied widespread domestic opposition to the war, keeping about 1,400 Australian troops in and around Iraq, mostly in non-combat roles. He is seeking a fifth term later this year, and recent polls suggest voters are increasingly unhappy about his refusal to set a deadline for withdrawing Australian troops from the Middle East.

 

"You either rat on the ally or you stay with the ally," he said. "If it's all right for us to go, it's all right for the Americans and the British to go, and if everybody goes, Iraq will descend into total civil war and there'll be a lot of bloodshed."

Just like life under Pinochet

By Nir Hasson

 

Haaretz  Mon., February 12, 2007

"The Palestinians' lives under the occupation are reminiscent of the lives of Chile's citizens under the dictatorship," says Chilean Judge Juan Guzman, who is visiting Israel, last week. "There, too, people who thought differently were considered enemies: They were imprisoned, tortured and killed. There, too, people couldn't move from place to place, they didn't have freedom and they didn't have equality before the law. But here it's harder. It has been going on for longer," he added.

 

Guzman, 68, became known at the end of the 1990s as an investigative judge pursuing Augusto Pinochet, Chile's military dictator between 1973 and 1990. Guzman waged a long legal battle against Pinochet. Despite the former dictator's immunity, Guzman succeeded in filing several indictments against him and bringing him to trial. Pinochet's trial was never completed because of his health, and he died two months ago at age 91.

 

Last week Guzman came to Israel as a guest of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and the Alternative Information Center (AIC) to examine indicting Israelis responsible for house demolitions in European courts. Thus far, legal proceedings have been initiated only against military officers. The committee wants to indict civilians as well.

 

ICAHD has a list of three officials from the Civil Administration, the Jerusalem municipality and the Interior Ministry who ordered the demolition of houses. It is seeking to submit investigation requests against the officials in a European country where the courts have the authority to address international human rights violations. Guzman is slated to give the international seal of approval to the move. If such an investigation is opened, presumably arrest orders will be issued against the three and they will encounter difficulties in visiting Europe.

 

Guzman's great antagonist, Pinochet, died on December 10, International Human Rights Day. "I did not feel satisfaction, but I wasn't sad either," he says. "Chile lost a historic opportunity to rebuild itself," he says. "After the justice system was destroyed during the 17-year-long dictatorship, this was an opportunity to demonstrate its independence and to prove to Chile and to the entire world that no one is above the law, that even Pinochet can be tried."

 

Guzman disagrees with the Chilean Supreme Court, which ruled that Pinochet was not mentally able to stand trial. He says Pinochet was lucid until his last day.

 

Guzman has been a judge for 36 years. In January 1998, when he was serving as a judge in the Supreme Court of Santiago, he was chosen to investigate human rights charges filed against Pinochet and his officers. Guzman received 98 cases involving Pinochet. He traveled throughout Chile and conducted a comprehensive investigation into Pinochet's crimes.

 

Several months later, Pinochet was arrested in London by order of a Spanish judge, over Spanish citizens killed under the dictatorship. Pinochet returned to Chile a year and five months later, after a British court ruled that because of his poor health, he could not be extradited to Spain. Soon after that, Guzman field his first indictment on charges of responsibility for the "death squad," a secret police unit that murdered 75 regime opponents. Guzman also ordered the house arrest of the former dictator. The decision aroused a storm in Chile: Rightist elements and military officials took Pinochet's side, whereas the left took to the street to celebrate.

 

"It was no simple matter to bring Pinochet to trial," explains Hebrew University political science professor Mario Sznajder. "For some of the country's inhabitants, Pinochet was considered the nation's savior from the Communists." In addition, Pinochet enjoyed immunity after appointing himself a senator for life, and by virtue of the "amnesty law" he legislated. This law granted "automatic amnesty" to anyone who committed crimes before 1978, but Guzman circumvented this in a sophisticated way.

 

"I proved the law does not cover disappearances (the fates of more than 1,000 regime opponents are still unknown - N.H.). Thus, as in cases of kidnapping, this is a matter of a crime that did not end in 1978, but rather is ongoing, and until we find out what happened to those people, even if the amnesty law covers part of the crime, it does not cover all of it. The Supreme Court accepted my opinion," Guzman says.

 

In 2001, the Chilean Supreme Court ordered the proceedings against Pinochet cancelled due to his mental unfitness. Two years later, Guzman came across an interview Pinochet gave a Cuban television station in the United States on the 30th anniversary of the military coup.

 

"He spoke about 158 different subjects and appeared to be in very good and lucid shape," recalls Guzman. In the wake of the interview, which proved the dictator was fit to stand trial, Guzman reopened the investigation. The Supreme Court again revoked Pinochet's immunity, and Guzman filed another indictment against him, this time for Operation Condor - the South American military regimes' cooperation in persecuting opponents, which resulted in hundreds of murders.

 

Guzman went to Pinochet's home and interrogated him. "He could tell the difference between good and evil, and he could also tell the difference between what was convenient for him to answer and what was not convenient," relates Guzman. "This time he was less nice to me than he had been the first time. He understood I was prosecuting him. But he did not insult me and he was not aggressive."

 

Half a year later Guzman succeeded in filing yet another indictment, this time for what was called Operation Colombo, during the course of which 119 Communist activists disappeared. Their bodies were never found. These legal proceedings, like others opened by other investigative judges, were not completed by the time Pinochet died. "These investigations did the country a great favor. They openly showed what had happened during the time of the dictatorship," says Guzman. "Many Chileans did not believe things like that had indeed happened, and thought they were an invention of the Communists. But when the investigations began, they started to believe. I believe that thanks to those investigations, my country will never again fall into a dictatorship. In Spanish we say nunca mas - never again."

 

Professor Sznajder agrees. "Guzman's importance was that he tried to get to Pinochet, not as a journalist or as a political opponent, but rather by virtue of the authority of democratic law. He contributed to eliminating Chile's black hole, to erasing the second version of what had happened during those years. He touched upon the most painful things, opened wounds, uncovered facts and brought about a change, even if no verdict was obtained."

 

Guzman has no doubt that like Pinochet's officers and officials, Israeli officers and officials will pay the price of the crimes he believes are being committed against the Palestinians. "If we learn from history, it appears that ultimately those who commit crimes against humanity and violate human rights are judged, whether by a special international court or in a country. Sooner or later, human right violations come to court," he says.

 

During his trip, Guzman visited two Palestinian families whose homes in Issawiyeh and A-Tur were demolished. One of the families has been living in a tent near the ruins for two weeks.

 

"I saw them crying. Every home demolition is the demolition of a person's dignity and intimacy, and is prohibited by international law. I have also seen the wall built in occupied territory. I don't understand this, and I don't believe it is connected to security. It isn't logical. I am certain there are other ways to protect the Israelis, and at the same time, the Palestinians must be protected.

 

"I admire the Jewish people for the suffering it has endured and for its achievements in science, literature and music," he continues. "I identify with the Israelis, but my heart is with the people living under occupation and whose rights are being violated. Israel feels it is the victim of terror, but when you are here, you realize that what the Palestinians are doing is resisting occupation. The Palestinians are the victims, they are being exploited, their homes are being demolished, they are being detained under administrative orders, their property is being damaged, they need permits to move from place to place and their cities are becoming large prisons. There is no doubt they are the victims."

 

Guzman does not make any commitment that indictments will be filed against those responsible for demolishing homes. "I will study the issue, I will consult and I will see how the process can be advanced," he says, "but there is no doubt that with respect to international law, civilians directly responsible for human rights violations can be indicted, just like soldiers."

 

Meir Margalit, the field coordinator for ICAHD and the person who invited Guzman to visit Israel, says he has despaired of the Israeli justice system. "We feel we have exhausted the option of an Israeli investigator. Salvation won't come from here, and things are getting worse. Every year, about 400 houses in East Jerusalem and the territories are demolished."

 

"I am here on a peace mission," says Guzman. "I want my activities to awaken discussion of whether what is happening here is justified. From the Chilean experience, we know activity like this can cease human rights violations. I implore the Israeli government to stop the house demolitions, for the sake of its good reputation and for the sake of the good reputation of the entire human race."

 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=824148

Egypt releases 'rendition' cleric

A Muslim cleric allegedly kidnapped by CIA agents in Italy and handed over to the Egyptian authorities has been released, his lawyer has said.

 

BBc    Monday, 12 February 2007

 

The cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, has said he was tortured while in detention in Egypt.

 

His lawyer Montasser al-Zayat confirmed that his client had been released and was now back with his family.

 

The case was said to be an example of rendition, whereby terror suspects are transferred abroad for questioning.

 

Washington has acknowledged secret transfers of terrorism suspects to third countries but denies torturing suspects or handing them to countries which do torture.

 

In January, a court in Milan began a hearing to decide whether to indict 25 alleged CIA agents and several Italians accused of involvement in the 2003 kidnapping.

 

'Snatched'

 

Prosecutors have said the cleric was snatched on a Milan street and flown, via Germany, to his native Egypt where he was interrogated.

 

The cleric has accused Egyptian agents of using electric shocks, beatings and rape threats against him.

 

He had been initially charged with membership of an illegal organisation but the charges were later dropped. Mr Nasr was briefly released in 2004 but was later detained without charge under the north African country's emergency laws.

 

Mr al-Zayat said: "I expected that the justifications for his detention are done with. It's no longer a secret."

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6352717.stm

Israel offers 1, 429 Palestinian prisoners' in exchange for captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit

Ma'an  News  12 / 02 / 2007  Time:  16:17   

 

Gaza - - Palestinian Legislative Council member, Mohammad Shehab, is confident that Israel will release more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners, in a prisoners swap for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

 

Speaking to Ma'an, Shehab said that Shalit's captors have received a proposal from Egypt, whom Israel choose to negotiate through, offering the release of 1,429 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the soldier. Shehab said "this came only after the Egyptians made persistent contact and consultation with Israel, who finally made an offer of this number."

 

Shehab also said "we will stand still until Israelis bow to our demands, Palestinian people have sacrificed hundreds of martyrs since the capture of Shalit, homes were destroyed, people were arrested, we can't release him for nothing."

 

Shehab viewed the prisoners' exchange deal as intrinsic to the Mecca deal, he said "the Mecca agreement was built on the prisoners' document; this document was behind the agreement. This issue is not only the demand of the prisoners', but the demand of the people."

 

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=19471

Raed Salah to face incitement probe; cabinet okays continuation of Mugrabi construction

By Gideon Alon, Yoav Stern and Jonathan Lis

 

Haaretz  Sun., February 11, 2007

Police chief Moshe Karadi yesterday ordered a probe into Islamic Movement leader Sheikh Ra'ad Salah on suspicions of incitement and sedition. This comes due to his recent comments against Israeli rule, security forces and the police, due to excavations under the Mugrabi bridge that began last week.

 

An overwhelming cabinet majority yesterday approved continuing the construction at the Mugrabi ascent "in the proposed format and as speedily as possible." Only Labor ministers Amir Peretz, Yuli Tamir and Ghaleb Majadele abstained from the vote.

 

Dozens of Islamic Movement supporters were removed yesterday from the Mugrabi ascent, where they had congregated in the early morning hours. Several prominent members of the Islamic Movement's operative arm, the al-Aqsa Institution, were arrested. A Jerusalem court ordered three members to stay away from the capital for a week. Five members were detained for questioning after arriving to protest outside the Old City's Dung Gate without a permit. Police quickly dispersed the demonstration.

 

The movement vowed to continue its protest in the coming days. A spokesman for the movement said, "The Israeli government bears responsibility for any violence or bloodshed that occurs here. With this activity, Olmert hopes to cover the affairs in which he is involved."

 

Jerusalem police continued to be on high alert yesterday. However, protests waned, apparently as demonstrators returned to work, and there was almost no disorderly conduct in the capital yesterday.

 

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter toured the renovation site near the Western Wall yesterday. Dichter supported the decision to continue the excavation and reconstruction on the site and said that many of the Muslims protesting the works are not aware that the Mugrabi Gate is outside the Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque.

 

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "We will not allow Khaled Meshal and Ra'ad Salah to dictate to us what to do 20 meters from the Western Wall. Tomorrow they will be telling us what to do at the Jaffa Gate, and then they will dictate what to do in the Mamilla neighborhood. This is our land and our sovereignty. They cannot be allowed to tell us what to do in the Western Wall Plaza."

 

Olmert added that it is important to strengthen moderates among Israeli Arabs, but said Salah operates according to different standards. If his vision were to come true, Israel would not exist as a Jewish and democratic state, Olmert said. The works are begin carried out in Israeli territory outside the Temple Mount and were coordinated in advance with the relevant parties, including the Palestinian Waqf, and the Jordanian and Egyptian governments, he said.

 

Dichter revealed that in contradiction to claims by Peretz that he hadn't been informed of the construction work, Peretz had been briefed on the details of the plans. Dichter cited a February 1 meeting in the Defense Minister's Office, during which they reviewed the state of things prior to the excavation. A police officer presented Peretz the planned start date for the work and police projections of likely scenarios.

 

Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman sharply criticized Peretz. "You are acting irresponsibly. You are not acting like the defense minister in Israel's cabinet, but like a candidate in the primaries. This matter must be removed from politics - stop mumbling and babbling and start working."

 

Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said the Islamic Movement was leading provocative measures that must be curbed immediately. He said law enforcement must resolve the problem. He also called on Olmert and Peretz to renew their dialogue. "The lack of communication between you provides a tailwind to Israel's detractors," Mofaz said.

 

Absorption Minister Zeev Boim asked Peretz, "I don't understand why you didn't issue a warning. If you thought the works at the Mugrabi Gate constitute an existential threat to Israel, how is it possible that you sufficed with sending Amos Gilad's letter to the Prime Minister's Bureau?"

 

Olmert himself also expressed wonder at how Peretz only sent him a fax. "I did receive a fax from Amir, but he could have called me and told me his position," Olmert commented.

 

 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824535.html