immediate protection of someone else's property

"The case involved a group of activists who broke into and vandalised a Brighton factory run by engineering firm EDO MBM. The company was making parts for use in the bomb-aiming equipment on Israeli F16 warplanes. The invasion shut the factory for a week and caused £187,000 worth of damage. But five men and women who appeared in court claimed they had done nothing wrong under criminal damage law. The law says someone is not guilty of causing damage if they believed it was necessary for the immediate protection of someone else's property." (thanks Chris)

Can you imagine the international outcry if they were to burn the Torah, for example?

"The Dove World Outreach Center, a non-denominational church in Gainesville FL, is planning to mark this year's anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with a little bonfire of Korans, the holy book of Islam. They even have a Facebook page with a mission statement to justify their actions:" (thanks Olivia)

You may cry some more in the future: you will be losing your "soul" because it does not belong to you

""But after a visit to Israel, I would get on the plane and cry. I felt like part of my soul is here.""

Desperate Zionist propaganda

I mean, I dont remember that Zionist propaganda was that dumb. I mean, it has always been dumb but this dumb? They now remind me of Ba`thist propaganda of the 1960s: "A car bomb that exploded July 15 in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, may indicate that Mexican drug cartels are being assisted by Hizbullah terrorists." To get American public sympathy, I expect Zionist propagandists to soon find links between JFK's assassin and Hizbullah.

American Injustice System

"Similar things have happened elsewhere. The incarceration rate in Britain has more than doubled, and that in Japan increased by half, over the period. But the trend has been sharper in America than in most of the rich world, and the disparity has grown. It is explained neither by a difference in criminality (the English are slightly more criminal than Americans, though less murderous), nor by the success of the policy: America’s violent-crime rate is higher than it was 40 years ago...Many states have mandatory minimum sentences, which remove judges’ discretion to show mercy, even when the circumstances of a case cry out for it. “Three strikes” laws, which were at first used to put away persistently violent criminals for life, have in several states been applied to lesser offenders. The war on drugs has led to harsh sentences not just for dealing illegal drugs, but also for selling prescription drugs illegally. Peddling a handful can lead to a 15-year sentence." (thanks Bassam)

Nahr Al-Barid

As I was responding to questions after my talk in Nahr Al-Barid, a Lebanese Army convoy passed outside and ordered the cars to be moved. The host was asked to deliver the message for owners of the cars to move them. I stole the microphone and said: the Lebanese Army is hopefully on its way to liberate Palestine. Please move your cars. My host begged me to stop.

Nahr Al-Barid

Before you enter Nahr Al-Barid, you pass through an office of Lebanese Army Intelligence. They write down your names and check your ID cards. As they were writing in old-fashioned notebooks, I observed to the officer: you badly need computers for your work here. He bristled at me: No, we are quite comfortable this way.

Nahr Al-Barid

The story of Nahr Al-Barid has not been told yet. I told the survivors that I hope to be able to tell their story one day.

Ben Wedemen is no Octavia Nasr

While the Zionists try to target Ben Wedemen, it is important to note that Wedemen is a serious journalist who is a rare person of justice in the US media regarding the Middle East. (thanks Olivia)

Zionism and mixing of the races

"On Monday, Sabbar Kashur, a young Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for something called “rape by deception.” Apparently, Mr. Kashur had consensual sex with a Jewish Israeli woman after assuring her that he was also Jewish. When she found out that he had lied to her, she went to the police.Imagine living in a society where you can say, “I wish I had never slept with you. I’m going to the cops.” Only it’s not funny because Sabbar Kashur will probably go to jail for a year and a half. Meanwhile, efforts to combat actual sexual violence are undermined by a cynical distortion of the term rape. The real crime here, of course, is miscegenation. Anyone from the US should recognize the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling for what it is: an anti-miscegenation measure on par with the now-defunct US laws against “race mixing” that were once used to uphold white supremacy. For most of us in the US, dating across race lines now seems about as edgy as wearing white after Labor Day. You can read Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class for a reminder of how white Americans’ obsession with “racial purity” was codified to keep African Americans and white women in their place. That’s the paradigm in which we should understand this case." (thanks Dina)

Genius of Western Media: a German magazine talk about RADIK Hariri

"Anklage wegen Mordes an Radik Hariri?" (thanks Christoph)

Definition of Chutzpah

"Israel to UN: North Korea arms proliferation destabilizing the Middle East"

Israel and the US

"Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study. Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan. Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify. It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own. Leave aside the question of whether Israel’s battles are or should also be America’s. It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it. The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq doesnot, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure. But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East." (thanks Sultan)

My talk in Nahr Al-Barid

Here is a report on my talk in Nahr Al-Barid Refugee camp.

Ghassan Khatib: his shameful record expands

"Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian Authority spokesman, called on Israel "to be more careful with these types of incidents."" Ghassan Khatib wants Israel to be more careful as they kill Palestinians.

prisoners

solidarity with prisoners. (thanks Nimer)

Let us hope that Hamas does not ban her

"Gaza's only fisherwoman"

Police brutality in Egypt

"Hundreds of allegations have been logged into Egypt’s “torture diary,” a chronicle of claimed police brutality compiled by the Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, an independent victims advocacy group in Cairo."

Nahr Al-Barid

They told me that most of the survivors from 1948 in the camp died right after the assault on the camp from massive heart attacks.

Past Arab subsidies of the British economy

“By January 1975, the Saudis had invested a massive $9.3 billion in Britain, of which $800 million was in the public sector – a total investment equivalent to around £20 billion today.” from Mark Curtis’s “Secret Affairs"...pg.118. (thanks Nu`man)

This is Zionism

"A 23-year-old Arab man sustained serious injuries after being attacked in Tiberias, allegedly for talking to a young Jewish woman. Police are still searching for the suspected assailant, a 19-year-old who fled the scene."

Pro-US puppets are allowed to have nuclear ambitions

""We have no concern with these countries (Saudi, the UAE) developing conventional nuclear power," Luis Echavarri, director general of the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency, told Reuters."

smuggler for the Palestinians

"The smugglers who sneak consumer goods, cash and weapons into the blockaded Gaza Strip have cut hundreds of holes in an underground steel wall Egypt is building along the border to try to stop them, two Egyptian security officials said Thursday.Rare footage filmed by AP Television News showed one smuggler cutting through the barrier with a blowtorch. The smuggler, his face covered by a scarf, said it took him five hours to breach the obstacle. Hundreds of tunnels running under the Egypt-Gaza border deliver consumer goods to the Hamas-run territory, bypassing a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt three years ago. In recent weeks, Israel has eased its blockade by allowing most consumer goods into Gaza again through land crossings, and smugglers say they are more concerned about the competition from legitimate imports than about the wall." (thanks Sultan)

How nice of Israel: so generous with its puppets

"The defense establishment has advised the government to allow the Palestinian Authority to import 50 Russian-made armored vehicles - something Israel has been refusing to do for five years now." (thanks Olivia)

Nahr Al-Barid

So much to write about Nahr Al-Barid. So much anger when you visit. And you think that the Lebanese state and its army and people could not find sources of "heroism"--imagined of course--except by destroying a refugee camp?

Bronner settles the conflict over Jersusalem

""And today, here in the capital of the Jewish state, there is a tendency to see the world purely through Jewish history and culture."" (thanks Louay)

Friends of Israeli war crimes

The Friends of Israel Initiative is an international operation and was first launched in Paris on 31 May – the same day that Israeli soldiers boarded the Mavi Marmara in international waters and killed nine activists. The organisation was reportedly established by Dore Gold, an American born Israeli who heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and was formerly an adviser to Ariel Sharon and the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[1]" (thanks Anthony)

The Nazis that are adored in the West

"But Berman could have found an another example even closer at hand. Anwar Sadat was jailed for 2 years by the British in Egypt in 1942 for actually plotting with German spies, but his sins were conveniently forgotten after he signed the 1978 peace treaty with Israel.)" (thanks Nader)

Oh, you can easily unknow it: just as you did to support the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan

""And I'm afraid I know too much about the history of the conflict to think of Israel as just a tiny, little island surrounded by a sea of ravening wolves and so on. I mean, I know quite a lot about how that state was founded, and the amount of violence and dispossession that involved. And I'm a prisoner of that knowledge. I can't un-know it."" (thanks Redoune)

Is there a dirty war in which Israel is not involved?

""I was familiar with Israel before coming here," he tells the Yedioth Ahronoth daily. "In the framework of my previous positions as air force commander and chief of staff, I had a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace Industries."For years Israel has aided our war on terror through the exchange of information and the sale of military technology and equipment," says Perera."

paying for King PlayStation

"The Harley-riding king of Jordan spent at least several days touring Northern California on his motorcycle with American taxpayers footing a major portion of the bill for his security." (thanks Shehadeh)

Israeli is very impressed with Saudi Arabia's "reforms"

"Israel is not the only place that supervises teachers and lecturers for fear they will impart the wrong kind of knowledge. Perhaps Israeli education officials should be sent to Saudi Arabia to a study a recently introduced program known as "ideological security," whose purpose is to cleanse the educational institutions of the hidden agendas of teachers in the school system.

The program is already bearing fruit and some 2,000 teachers have been fired or transferred to administrative positions out of fear they were inculcating the youth with dangerous content." (thanks Farah)

a traitor to his own ideals

"A few months ago Lydon claimed he's "well-known for being a pacifist" and named Mahatma Gandhi as his all-time hero. Surely, then, he would be open to supporting one of the most impressive examples of Gandhi's principles being put into action in today's world: the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bi'lin, where unarmed activists are regularly fired at by Israeli forces. Surely, too, he would be sympathetic to the call made by numerous Palestinian trade unions and other campaign groups for a cultural and economic boycott of Israel.Not a chance, I'm afraid."

King PlayStation has his priorities

"There is a good chance that if you pick up an Arabic-language video game, it was made in Jordan." (thanks Olivia)

Saudi-Israeli conspiracy? What conspiracy?

Israeli products in Saudi Arabia. (thanks Esraa)

fruits of liberation

"Cancer, leukaemia and infant mortality are all increasing in the Iraqi town of Fallujah, which saw fierce fighting between US forces and Sunni insurgents, a new survey says.Still one of the most dangerous places in Iraq, doctors have been reporting a large number of birth defects since the 2004 offensive." (thanks Youssef)

Israeli terrorists guarding Israeli terrorists

"Reservists in the Israel Defense Forces have been deployed at night to guard the vineyard of a head of the former Jewish underground in the Hebron area, a reserve officer says. This would violate the IDF's policy against guarding private property.The former militant, Menachem Livni, was convicted in the 1980s for his role in the attack on an Islamic college in which three Palestinian students were killed. He received a life sentence, but president Chaim Herzog pardoned him after seven years." (thanks Sarah)

This afternoon

I will speak at 2:00PM in Nahr Al-Barid camp.

Racism at Lebanese beaches

Racism/classism in Lebanon. (thanks Farah)

Your favorite puppet

"Asif Zardari Richer than Queen Elizabeth II"

All that you have done to our people is registered in notebooks

"The IDF's Civil Administration destroyed a Palestinian village Monday morning that had earlier been cleared out when its water supply was cut off.The IDF demolished about 55 structures in the West Bank village of Farasiya, including tents, tin shacks, plastic and straw huts, clay ovens, sheep pens and bathrooms. These structures served the 120 farmers, hired workers and their families who lived in the Jordan Valley village."

Yes, this harms "Israel's image" and not its occupation of Palestine and its war crimes

"Three groups of Israeli teens facing IDF enlistment get expelled from various hotels in island of Ios after getting drunk, causing damage to property. Israel's consul in Athens says such cases cause great damage to country's image".

dazed and confused

"After President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu met in Washington earlier this month for their most cordial meeting yet, the official complained: "Now we find the Americans talking like the Israelis without any justifications." The Obama administration, he concluded, is "confused.""

Nahr Al-Barid

I will speak tomorrow afternoon (Thursday) in Nahr Al-Barid camp. At 2:00PM صالة الربيع

Obama's surge

"The US military build-up in Kandahar is likely to further strengthen the hold of the Taliban over the vital southern Afghanistan city, a highly respected security organisation said today in a bleak report warning of record Taliban violence and rising civilian deaths across the country." (thanks Olivia)