Israeli attack on USS Liberty (US Navy ship)

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a U.S. Navy intelligence ship, USS Liberty, in international waters about 12.5 nautical miles (23 km) from the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, north of El Arish, by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967.It occurred during the Six-Day War, a conflict between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The Israeli attack killed 34 U.S. servicemen and wounded at least 173. The attack was the second deadliest against a U.S. Naval vessel since the end of World War II, surpassed only by the Iraqi Exocet missile attack on the USS Stark on May 17, 1987, and marked the single greatest loss of life by the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Evidence of 1967 atrocities pile up against israel

israel’s long list of atrocities against mankind doesn’t seem to end . . .

EL-ARISH, Egypt (CNN) — [The] recent discovery of mass graves in the Sinai threatens to re-open old wounds between Israel and Egypt.Villager Hassan Al-Malah declares to other searchers he’s found more bones. Neighbors quickly dig up what they say is a mass grave of Egyptian prisoners killed by Israeli soldiers during the 1967 war.

The Bedouins say they witnessed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers executed without trial. Then they buried the bodies when Israelis left them to rot in the desert sun.

“They would nail the prisoners hands to the trees like this and shoot them,” said witness Hassan Al-Malah, raising his hands behind his head. “It was Jews from America.”

Neither Egyptian nor Israeli authorities ever investigated what happened here at El-Arish. “Mothers and fathers would come and look for their kids but what could we tell them? We didn’t know the names of these guys,” said Hamada Mohamed Hassan.

Aryeh Biro, a retired Israeli officer, publicly admitted weeks ago that war crimes were committed in the Sinai in 1967. But the recent discovery of mass graves has revived memories in Egypt and perhaps renewed animosity against the former enemy. Egypt and Israel made peace a decade after the war but there is little trade or tourism between the two countries.

Now the Israelis are offering to compensate families of the victims but some Egyptians want Israeli officers put on trial as well. “Such people should be punished according to the law,” said Mohamed Abdel Moneim of the Al-Ahram newspaper.

The Israelis have refused to put any officers on trial, saying it was all too long ago. However, the memories are still fresh for the villagers near El-Arish in the Sinai.

Egypt and Israel may have buried their differences, but for now, the remains of what may be hundreds of massacred soldiers are unlikely to rest in peace.

1967 is “too long ago” to demand justice for non-Jews, but 1942 is long enough to demand reperations for Jews.

The hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

Thank you, Qrswave from www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com

Australia’s neo-conservatives target books on Islam

The adage that “when you point one finger at another, four other fingers point back to you” aptly describes the Australian prime minister’s statement after his country’s withdrawal from a cricket tour in Zimbabwe last month.  “The Mugabe regime is behaving like the Gestapo towards its political opponents,” said John Howard (pic).  The statement is not surprising coming from Howard, known for his strong support for any policies adapted by European and American leaders.  The Howard government recently outdid its Western masters in the war on terror, announcing that it would begin banning and restricting materials that it deemed to be promoting ‘terrorism’. 

The announcement alarmed activists who are already worried about the way in which Canberra is living up to its status as deputy sheriff for the US.  It is common knowledge that the latest book-banning move did not target works bearing titles such as “How To Make A Bomb”.  Nor did it mean removing books praising Hizbullah – the kind of book that could not have made it into the Australian bookshelves anyway, thanks to the intensely Islamophobic campaign being championed by a tiny, but vocal and powerful, segment of the country.

The threat to reinstate the old practice of confiscating reading materials has come true.  In one recent case, Australian customs seized several titles that had been sent by a Malaysian publisher to a Muslim bookseller in downtown Sydney.  Among them is one titled A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Modern World by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a US-based Iranian-born academic who is not even remotely political in most of his works, as well as another book on everyday Muslim do’s and dont’s which has become almost a household name among Muslims: Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam.  Although the books have since been returned, probably after the Australian authorities realised how silly they had been to confiscate them at the first place, it shows just how strongly panic alarms can be set off by anything that sounds Islamic, never mind if the authors are harmless even by Western academic standards.  Last year several Australian universities, fearing a breach of sedition laws, voluntarily removed “Islamic fundamentalist” titles from their libraries.

The incidents of September 2001 in the US, the Iraq debacle and the ongoing ‘war on terror’ are precursors to change for better or worse is a foregone conclusion.  The brunt of their impact was felt mostly by Muslims in western ‘democracies’.  Cynics argue that it took the war on terror to jolt some of these Muslims, who came to live in western societies solely because of the freedoms they offer, over the fact how fragile such ‘freedom’ in these western countries is.  Now Muslims who flee the very ‘restrictions’ in their countries feel that these Western governments are now going back in time, and behaving almost exactly like their Muslim counterparts in suppressing many of the democractic cosmetics, such as the right to defend one’s self, and freedom of speech.

Calls in some parts of Western societies to take a “hard look at Islam” are nothing new, especially since 2001, and Australia (although geographically not western) is no exception.  So embattled are the Australian Muslims that many prominent Australian Muslims take pains to prove their multiculturalism and their openness to other cultures.  Multiculturalism has now become from being fashionable to almost a cliche among Muslim intellectuals and community leaders in their quest to be accepted by the Australian mainstream.  As a result, the Muslim leadership in Australia conduct themselves within a reactionary framework. 

Today, Muslim leaders cannot hope to convince others about their moderation without filling up their curriculum vitae with photographs showing involvement in multiculturalism and inter-religious dialogues.  Similarly, it is not strange to see Muslims trying to discredit other Muslims, often simply by accusing them of “promoting hate” and not being “multicultural”.

Even with all the efforts by Muslims to drive home the point that Islam is accommodating, the fact that the Howard government now resorts to what Western governments would condemn as ‘medieval’, the practice of book-banning elsewhere, shows how much progress has been made vis a vis distortion of Islam in the media and the public arena.

Muslims in Australia comprise nearly 2 percent  of Australia’s population (approximately 300,0000), and are often said to be the most diverse Muslim minority in the Western world, originating from more than seventy countries, including China.  While the majority came from Lebanon, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East, today around 40 per cent of Muslims are Australian-born.  Yet unlike other non-whites, the Muslims have attracted the most attention, usually negative, from policy-makers and media debates.  While part of the fault lies among Muslim community leaders themselves for neglecting the huge moral crisis within their society, thus making Muslims prone to all sorts of labels.  The biased and sometimes racist policies of successive Australian governments have systematically brought the Australian Muslim community to the state it is in today: isolated and almost permanently ‘reactionary’.  Such was also the situation when Shaykh Taj al-Din al-Hilali’s speech in a mosque not long ago was repackaged by the Australian media to prepare for several weeks of Islam-bashing, laying bare the Muslim community’s helplessness, lack of focus and absence of leadership in dealing with others as well as with itself. 

How desperate the Muslims are to correct their image in the framework of the current Islamophobia was seen recently in a working paper released by the Lebanese Muslim Association, one of Australia’s most influential groups.  The report lamented that Muslims had themselves to blame for the state of affairs: “We have become the new communism, particularly in the West, and some people in our community are so repulsed by our actions it is making life unbearable for us and our offspring,” it said last March, even suggesting that imams to volunteer as fire-fighters in the raging bush-fires of that time to show their worth to the Aussie public.

The book-ban is only the latest in a series of back-peddling incidents by Canberra on democratic practices: the ‘anti-terror’ laws, the increase in information blockage by the authorities, and court suppression orders.  Under new “anti-terror” laws adopted in December 2005, any act of “praising” terrorism (which includes even merely sympathising with the social and economic roots of ‘terrorism’) can land one in prison. 

Australia’s mainstream media, notorious for their Islamophobic reporting, have come out strongly against these measures to ban reading materials and curb press freedom, although these new laws designed to force Muslims into ‘moderation’ are in fact a long-term product of the anti-Islam bias by the Aussie media themselves.  On May 10, major media groups announced a joint effort to fight restriction on freedom of information by Howard’s government.  Muslim activists, however, will be wiser not to hope that these people can fight for the Muslims’ right to those same ‘freedoms’.

Using the Web to stop a war

 

Wesley Clark is 62 years old. He is a retired four-star general, and is the former supreme allied commander of NATO. He’s a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a former (and perhaps future) presidential candidate. He’s a West Point valedictorian and a Rhodes Scholar. He also has a MySpace page, and a Facebook page, and he posts videos to YouTube.

The past year has seen public figures embracing sites like these to varying degrees. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Sam Brownback all announced their candidacies via Webcasts. Many 2008 presidential candidates have official MySpace pages. (Some have more friends than others — John Edwards: 12,253; Tom Tancredo: 957.) Edwards has embraced video blogging. Former candidate Mark Warner even hosted a town hall–style meeting last summer in Second Life. Of course, YouTube can also provide less flattering glimpses of candidates, as with the infamous George Allen “macaca” kerfuffle, and David Obey’s “idiot liberals” outburst last week.

But Clark is using online technology a little differently. He’s not a candidate (at least not yet). He’s trying to prevent a war. Last month, Clark helped launched StopIranWar.com, a site billed as a “one-stop resource for all Americans” to help avoid a looming catastrophe like the one playing out in Iraq.

On the site, Clark uses YouTube for video blog entries. In his stiff but straight-talking way, he teams with Jon Soltz, an Iraq veteran and chairman of VoteVets.org, to explore and explain the military ramifications of a potential attack on Iran: what it would mean from a strategic perspective for our overextended National Guard and reserves, for the troops on the ground in Iraq, and for our interests across the region.

There are only two clips up so far, but Clark and Soltz also text blog (each post branded, of course, with the requisite Del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati markers, and open for comments). Most interesting, though, is how Clark embraces the many ways of amplifying his message across cyberspace. Visitors are encouraged to add Clark as a friend on Facebook and to join his “Securing America’s Future” MySpace group. He employs the mapping program Frappr — a site originally conceived by its founders as a means of keeping in touch with post-college friends — to help connect constituents in far-flung areas. The site even uses Flickzor to allow visitors to send and receive video messages.

More prosaically, users are given the YouTube code and encouraged to post Clark’s videos on their own blogs. There’s an online petition, audio presentations of Clark’s media appearances, form letters meant for Congress — even downloadable T-shirt transfers.

The site’s ultimate efficacy remains to be seen, of course. But it would be nice if the Bush administration could approach Middle Eastern diplomacy with the same open mind and innovative thinking that Clark is using trying to prevent their next foreign policy blunder.

On the Web
StopIranWar.com: http://www.stopiranwar.com
Wesley Clark on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/securingamerica

If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran

The war in Iraq is lost. This fact is widely recognized by American military officers and has been recently expressed forcefully by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US forces in Iraq during the first year of the attempted occupation. Winning is no longer an option. Our best hope, Gen. Sanchez says, is “to stave off defeat,” and that requires more intelligence and leadership than Gen. Sanchez sees in the entirety of our national political leadership: “I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time.”

More evidence that the war is lost arrived June 4 with headlines reporting: “U.S.-led soldiers control only about a third of Baghdad, the military said on Monday.” After five years of war the US controls one-third of one city and nothing else.

A host of US commanding generals have said that the Iraq war is destroying the US military. A year ago Colin Powell said that the US Army is “about broken.” Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn says Bush has “piecemealed our force to death.” Gen. Barry McCafrey testified to the US Senate that “the Army will unravel.”

Col. Andy Bacevich, America’s foremost writer on military affairs, documents in the current issue of The American Conservative that Bush’s insane war has depleted and exhausted the US Army and Marine Corps:

“Only a third of the regular Army’s brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president’s strategy of escalation, the US will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.”

“The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army’s lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants.”

Bush has taken every desperate measure. Enlistment ages have been pushed up from 35 to 42. The percentage of high school dropouts and the number of recruits scoring at the bottom end of tests have spiked. The US military is forced to recruit among drug users and convicted criminals. Bacevich reports that wavers “issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent.” Combat tours have been extended from 12 to 15 months, and the same troops are being deployed again and again.

There is no equipment for training. Bacevich reports that “some $212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just plain worn out.” What remains is in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under these circumstances, “staying the course” means total defeat.

Even the neoconservative warmongers, who deceived Americans with the promise of a “cakewalk war” that would be over in six weeks, believe that the war is lost. But they have not given up. They have a last desperate plan: Bomb Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney is spear- heading the neocon plan, and Norman Podhoretz is the plan’s leading propagandist with his numerous pleas published in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary to bomb Iran. Podhoretz, like every neoconservative, is a total Islamophobe. Podhoretz has written that Islam must be deracinated and the religion destroyed, a genocide for the Muslim people.

The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke Iran to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket propelled grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash the militias against US troops. These weapons would neutralize US tanks and helicopter gunships and destroy the US military edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces subject to being cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America on the verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up to “save the troops” by nuking Iran.

Five years of unsuccessful war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel’s recent military defeat in Lebanon have convinced the neocons that America and Israel cannot establish hegemony over the Middle East with conventional forces alone. The neocons have changed US war doctrine, which now permits the US to preemptively strike with nuclear weapons a non-nuclear power. Neocons are forever heard saying, “what’s the use of having nuclear weapons if you can’t use them.”

Neocons have convinced themselves that nuking Iran will show the Muslim world that Muslims have no alternative to submitting to the will of the US government. Insurgency and terrorism cannot prevail against nuclear weapons.

Many US military officers are horrified at what they think would be the worst ever orchestrated war crime. There are reports of threatened resignations. But Dick Cheney is resolute. He tells Bush that the plan will save him from the ignominy of losing the war and restore his popularity as the president who saved Americans from Iranian nuclear weapons. With the captive American media providing propaganda cover, the neoconservatives believe that their plan can pull their chestnuts out of the fire and rescue them from the failure that their delusion has wrought.

The American electorate decided last November that they must do something about the failed war and gave the Democrats control of both houses of Congress. However, the Democrats have decided that it is easier to be complicit in war crimes than to represent the wishes of the electorate and hold a rogue president accountable. If Cheney again prevails, America will supplant the Third Reich as the most reviled country in recorded history.

Iraqi Lawmakers Pass Resolution That May Force End to Occupation

While most observers are focused on the U.S. Congress as it continues to issue new rubber stamps to legitimize Bush’s permanent designs on Iraq, nationalists in the Iraqi parliament — now representing a majority of the body — continue to make progress toward bringing an end to their country’s occupation.

The parliament yesterday passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the U.N. mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists, may veto the measure.

The law requires the parliament’s approval of any future extensions of the mandate, which have previously been made by Iraq’s prime minister. It is an enormous development; lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition’s mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now.

Reached today by phone in Baghdad, Nassar al Rubaie, the head of Al-Sadr bloc in Iraq’s Council of Representatives, said, “This new binding resolution will prevent the government from renewing the U.N. mandate without the parliament’s permission. They’ll need to come back to us by the end of the year, and we will definitely refuse to extend the U.N. mandate without conditions.” Rubaie added: “There will be no such a thing as a blank check for renewing the U.N. mandate anymore, any renewal will be attached to a timetable for a complete withdrawal.”

Without the cover of the U.N. mandate, the continued presence of coalition troops in Iraq would become, in law as in fact, an armed occupation, at which point it would no longer be politically tenable to support it. While polls show that most Iraqis consider U.S. forces to be occupiers rather than liberators or peacekeepers — 92 percent of respondents said as much in a 2004 survey by the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies — the U.N. mandate confers an aura of legitimacy on the continuing presence of foreign troops on Iraq’s streets, even four years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The resolution was initiated when a majority of Iraqi lawmakers signed a nonbinding legislative petition two weeks ago that called on the Iraqi government to demand a withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country.

While the issue of the Multinational Force’s (MNF) mandate has been virtually ignored by the American media, it has been a point of fierce contention in Baghdad. Last fall, just after the midterm elections in the United States, a coalition of Iraqi nationalists in the parliament tried to attach conditions to the mandate’s extension.

Iraqi lawmaker Jabir Habib (a Shia closely aligned with the al-Sadrist Movement) said in an interview last fall that the Iraqi Assembly had been poised to vote on the issue. “We spent the last months discussing the conditions we wanted to add to the mandate,” he said, “and the majority of the parliament decided on three major conditions. These conditions included pulling the coalition forces out of the cities and transferring responsibility for security to the Iraqi government, giving Iraqis the right to recruit, train, equip and command the Iraqi security forces, and requiring that the U.N. mandate expire and be reviewed every six months instead of every 12 months.”

Lawmakers said that while they likely had enough support to require a timetable for withdrawal as a condition of the mandate’s renewal last year, they were sidelined by al-Maliki when the prime minister sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council requesting an extension without consulting members of parliament. The move outraged lawmakers.

In a phone interview just after the extension, Hassan al-Shammari, a Shia parliamentarian representing the al-Fadila party, said: “We had a closed session two days ago, and we were supposed to vote on the mandate in 10 days. I can not believe the mandate was just approved without our knowledge or input.” Saleh al-Mutlaq, a secular Sunni lawmaker, was also shocked when we spoke with him last fall. “This is totally unexpected,” he said. “It is another example of the prime minister dismissing the views of the parliament and monopolizing all power.”

Today’s resolution means that Maliki will not be able to make that claim this time around. Reached by phone today in Amman, Jordan, following the vote, al-Mutlaq said: “The parliament is more powerful now — we can block the renewal of the U.N. mandate and demand to attach a timetable to it.”

Iraq’s government faces a crisis of legitimacy, in large part due to its refusal to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces long favored by as many as four out of five Iraqis. According to a poll last year by the Project on International Policy Attitudes, 80 percent of Iraqis believe the U.S. plans to maintain permanent military bases in the country and three out of four believe that if their government were to demand a timetable for withdrawal, Washington would ignore it (according to the poll’s authors, that finding was a major driver of the significant support among all groups of Iraqis for attacking coalition troops).

It is possible, even probable, that the Maliki regime will veto the resolution passed today. The White House’s separatist allies in Baghdad have consistently found ways to bypass the assembly. Al Mutlaq said today that the nationalist bloc probably doesn’t have the the two-thirds majority required to override a veto.

He warned, however, that the more the al-Maliki regime does to sideline the Iraqi parliament, the more Iraqis will be compelled to turn to violent resistance to the occupation. He said: “It will lead to many groups withdrawing from the political process and could only make things even worse.”

The resolution passed today is only one part of the nationalists’ effort to bring about a U.S. withdrawal. Nassar al Rubaie said of the measure’s passage: “All of this is just our backup plan, but our other and more specific resolution setting a timetable will come soon.” He promised that nationalists in parliament would force debate on a “clean” and binding resolution requiring occupation forces to withdrawal from the country in the immediate future. “We’ll start the deliberations next week,” he said. “We have enough signatures for that one already.”

Raed Jarrar is Iraq consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at Raed in the Middle. Joshua Holland is a senior writer at AlterNet.