Since I am known as a holocaust “denier”, now and then I am approached by high school students who want to write a paper on the holocaust.. I give these students the direst of warnings. This is what I say: “Don’t touch this subject. The holocaust is the foundation of the state of Israel. The Jews will not sit idly by to have that foundation undermined or even scrutinized. You are starting your productive life. Have a care!” But nevertheless I always pull revisionist material together for them. May they learn!
My mother told me about a lecture on old age. The lecturer told the audience that he can’t say anything good about getting old. I disagree. I found in old age an exhilarating liberation. Having to make a living makes cowards of us all. Well, I made my living. I was reticent while my children were still under my roof. My children are independent. I no longer seek the approbation of my fellow men. If the present German government consisting of scum and traitors would give me the Bundesverdienstkreuz which is so coveted by members of DANK (Deutsch/Amerikanischer Nationaler Kongress) I would feel dishonored.
Acquaintances have told me: “Chris watch out, the Jews are going to get you.” My reply is: “Die I must. The Iraqi and the Palestinian young men and women sacrifice their young lives. Why should I have such a care about my old life?” I scare off the young from joining our fight. They have too much to lose. This fight is the task of us old timers. But how can we fight back with such limited resources at our disposal? Here are a few pointers! I welcome additional suggestions.
1. Write letters to the editor of your news-paper and to organizations. If your letter is rejected it is at least read by one, the rejecter.
2. Place revisionist books into your library. Don’t take no for an answer! I had to go to the library board to get the first book accepted, the Leuchter Report. This is what I said: “The M. Public Library has a shelf full of Holocaust books. Without the revisionist books, a more apt name for M. Public Library would be M Public Indoctrination Center.” These are the books which I was able to place: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century/ Butz; The Auschwitz Myth/Staeglich; The Ball Report/ Ball; Forged War Crimes Malign the German Nation/Walendy; Is the Diary of Anne Frank Genuine?/Faurisson; Did Six Million Really Die?/Kulaszka; The Forced War/Hoggan; Adolf Hitler, the Unknown Artist/Price; Look to Germany the Heart of Europe/McClatchie; Stalin’s War of Extermination/Hoffmann; Flashpoint (Kristallnacht)/Weckert; Setting the Record Straight/Zundel; Reality Check/Miller.
3. Check out your Junior and Senior High School libraries. The librarian of the Junior High School was pleasant and accommodating. The librarian and the principal of the Senior High School denied me access. A call to the superintendent opened the doors. Since these two schools did not purchase, or accept from me revisionist books I decided to run for school board.
4. Run for a local office, major, alderman, school board etc. Running for office gives you a free forum. We revisionists have common sense, that is why we are revisionists. This common sense will stand you in good stead when you have to expound on the problems facing the community. I started to run for school board in l995 and I have run every year since then. I am a former teacher and therefore have a good idea how our schools should be run. The refusal of revisionist books by our two high schools is not the only issue I bring up, but it is always an issue. I do not know if I will every win a seat on the board (voter fraud is a problem). But the publicity is free.
5. Go to holocaust lectures and challenge. I am like Ferdinand the Bull. I would rather sniff flowers than fight. But I make myself go into the “arena,” and I force myself to speak out. Needless to say you have to be well versed in revisionist literature. Knowledge of the truth is our weapon. About three years ago I signed up for a mini holocaust lecture series. Since the professor knew I would be there he brought in a psychiatrist who gave a fifteen minute lecture. The subject was denial. “Why do we deny? We deny because we do not want to accept a negative self image.” My reply to the psychiatrist was short: “I do not deny the holocaust. Denial belongs to the realm of emotions. I refute the holocaust, and that has to do with logic.” The psychiatrist had nothing more to say.
6. In Wisconsin we have Public Access TV to which I bring revisionist videos. After they have been returned, I wait for a month and bring them back.
I would feel ashamed if I would not use the weapons which have been forged with such tremendous sacrifices by men like Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson, Wilhelm Staeglich etc. And let us remember, we are not just fighting for the good name of Germany. We, revisionists are the true American patriots. Truth, justice, patriotism go hand in hand. Let us fight while we still may.
As the world watched in shock and horror at the Gaza holocaust, those in Israel’s Alternate Universe say the response to the small periodic homemade rockets was “necessary and proportionate”. So, using White phosphorus, DIME missiles, unmanned drones and tanks to wipe out hospitals, schools, mosques, 1400 civilians and 400 children, was “necessary and proportionate”.
An Israeli government report has said that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza earlier this year was “necessary and proportionate”.
According to the United Nations, the Israeli military campaign left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties and 200 schools damaged or destroyed, as well as 39 mosques and two churches.
The UN Human Rights Council has appointed former South African judge Richard Goldstone to investigate whether war crimes were committed during the conflict.
Israel has declined to co-operate, accusing the UN Human Rights Council of bias against it.
Allegations persist against the Israeli military about killings of unarmed civilians, the use of civilians as human shields and indiscriminate destruction of property. source
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”– Desmond Tutu
We live in an era defined by its brutality. Our challenge is whether to accept this – or to take the risks necessary to transform our world commons in beloved community. A year ago this August, forty-four ordinary people from seventeen different countries sailed to Gaza in two, small wooden boats. We did what the world would not do – we broke through the siege of Gaza. Over the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions. Ours remain the only international ships to reach the Gaza Strip in over forty-two years. In the Middle-East, the struggle for justice is an uncertain endeavour in the best of times. On all sides human rights workers are beset with difficulties and distress. The Arab states are tyrannies, their peoples subject to secret police, arbitrary arrest, torture, and oppression. Within their societies, the Arab world is equally fractured by ethnic and class tensions, poverty, and political stagnation. From the outside, from the West, the Middle-East faces both open and covert acts of intimidation, intervention, economic destabilization, and even war, invasion, and mass killings. Standing astride all these troubles, blocking near every attempt at progress in the region are the twin colossi of big oil and Israel. Seldom have a people been cursed with burdens more bitter, more devastating, and seemingly more intransigent than have the Arabs with oil and Israel. Nowhere is this truer today than in Gaza. In 1999, British Gas discovered huge natural gas fields, worth billions of dollars, in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza. Israel has already built a horizontal pipeline to siphon off gas from at least one of these fields. If there is an unspoken reason for the siege of Gaza – this is it. Israel maintains effective control of all points of entry and exit to Gaza, as well as de facto control of Gaza’s revenues and economy. As such, and despite the closure of settlements in Gaza in 2005, Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza as in the rest of Palestine.As an occupying power, Israel is responsible for the well-being of the people it occupies and cannot legally impose a blockade, particularly one the collectively punishes the entire population of Gaza. These are clear crimes and the Israeli government and military should be prosecuted for them. For the last three and a half years the Israeli siege has become increasingly ruthless. Less than twenty percent of normal trade is allowed into Gaza today. The siege has caused the local economy to collapse, leading to steep increases in unemployment, poverty and childhood malnutrition rates. Because of Israel’s siege there is little fuel to run Gaza’s power plant – so electricity is scarce and intermittent. Without electricity, water and sanitation systems do not function. On March 27, 2008 two elderly women in their 70s, a teenage girl, and two babies were killed by a flood of sewage in Umm Naser. Last year alone, well over 16 billion litres of raw sewage had to be dumped in the sea, turning the Mediterranean into a toilet and creating a public health disaster. Gaza is a tiny coastal plain, barely twenty-five miles long by four to seven miles wide. It does not have the ability to independently support the one and a half million human beings who live in one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Two-thirds of Gaza’s people are refugees, driven out of historical Palestine during Israel’s founding war in 1948. Over half the population are children. Israel has a long history of violence against Palestinian children. A few examples: In December 2004, the IDF shot and killed seven-year old Rana Siyam. Earlier that year, nine-year old Raghda Alassar was shot and killed in her school while she was taking an English test. Thirteen-year old Iman al-Hams was shot seventeen times by the IDF as she was walking home after class in Gaza. An Israeli captain went up to her corpse and shot her again in the head – “dead-checking” the schoolgirl. The IDF prosecuted him, but not for murder. He was charged with “illegal use of his weapon,” and – despite admitting that he emptied his entire magazine into a little girl – he was found “not guilty.” Over the summer of 2006, the IDF killed three-year old Bara Habib, three-year old Rajaa Abu Shaban, six-year old Rawan Hajjah, nine-year old Aya Salmeya, and over thirty-five other children just in Gaza alone. On January 16th, 2007, the IDF killed ten-year old Abir Aramin, the daughter of a Palestinian peace activist, as she was walking home from school. These are only a handful of cases. The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem estimates that over 900 Palestinian children were killed by the Israeli military between 2000 and 2008. Israel has already recreated the worst aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto in Gaza – transforming this small strip of land into the world’s largest open-air prison, and the humanitarian condition of the one and a half million men, women, and children illegally incarcerated in Gaza is now at its worst point in the last forty-two years of Israeli occupation. But there are darker histories waiting to be reborn. The simple and terrifying truth is that Israel is pushing the world on a path towards genocide. We are all en route to the slow-drip destruction of the Palestinian people. This reality must be forcefully confronted and fully overcome before it’s too late. It’s now been more than six months since the end of Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip, which led to the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, and the people of Gaza are still living in rubble. Israel’s hermetic closure has created a man-made and deliberately-sustained humanitarian catastrophe. The continuing failure of the international community to enforce its own laws and protect the people of Gaza demands that we as private citizens directly intervene to take action commensurate with the crisis. We must act because our governments refuse to do so. Regardless of Israeli threats or intimidation, Free Gaza volunteers intend to continue sailing unarmed boats to Gaza. Now more than ever – we need the people of the world to join with us. The siege of Gaza only serves to strengthen authoritarian structures on all sides of this conflict, entrenching centralized control, rallying people against a common enemy. The isolation of Gaza reinforces a belief that the world has forgotten Palestine, and little cares how Palestinians are forced to live or even whether they live or die. In contrast, civil resistance and citizens’ action movements are not only aimed against the injustices that we face – they are also strategies for social change. Nonviolent resistance empowers everyone with the knowledge that any among us can reach out, organize, and act to change the entire world. Time and again, history demonstrates that even the greatest of tyrannies can crumble to the ground when confronted with an organized and determined resistance. Join us, whether in whole or in part. Join the Free Gaza Movement, the International Solidarity Movement, and the BDS Movement. Join us and other campaigns in the struggle for justice for Palestine. We need volunteers to do research and writing, web updates, translation, graphic design, local organizing in their communities, and much more. Become part of the resistance. We are often told that resistance is either unwarranted or impossible. Liberal apologists for Israel, such as Thomas Friedman, are constantly demanding that Palestinians lay down their arms, all the while exhorting Israelis to pick them up in ever increasing acts of violence and degradation. When faced with violence in our world, our elites tell us that we have two – and only two – choices: capitulate to the violence, or go to war. Of course, which of these two choices is the right and proper course of action depends on who you are. Faced with Palestinian violence, Israelis must, rightly and properly, go to war. Faced with Israeli violence, Palestinians must, rightly and properly, capitulate. In Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. this is called “moral clarity:” the supposed necessity of pursuing Israeli security through deliberately creating massive insecurity among Palestinians. This is lunacy. But even mainstream “peace” movements in the West try to delegitimize resistance by calling on both Palestinians and Israelis to renounce overt acts of violence, equating Palestinians who commit suicide bombings with Israelis who send F-16s, D9 military bulldozers, and Apache attack helicopters to level entire neighborhoods. The problem is that the usually random and individual acts of violence by Palestinians against Israelis are not equal to the myriad structural oppressions and cruelties imposed on Palestinians through Israeli government policies. No Palestinian fighter jets bomb Israeli cities – because Palestine has no fighter jets. No Palestinian bulldozers demolish Israeli homes – because Palestine has no military bulldozers. No Palestinian soldiers invade Israeli neighbourhoods, terrorizing the populace – because there is no Palestinian army. The conflict in Palestine is a war of Israeli state terror against a largely unarmed and defenceless civilian population. Even immoral and self-defeating acts of violence against Israeli civilians (such as some suicide bombings are) cannot be equated with the daily humiliations, terror, and death that Israel inflicts on Palestinians by deliberate policy. Contrary to its presentation in the mainstream media, this conflict is neither a righteous war against evil Arab terrorists, nor a religious or ethnic dispute between two opposing and equally self-justified groups of people. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the struggle of two irreconcilable and unequal causes: the struggle of an oppressed people for freedom, justice, and self-determination against their oppressors’ struggle to maintain (and even expand) their domination. Under these circumstances resistance is not only a right – it’s a moral imperative. This is not to say that any and all acts of resistance are acceptable. Clearly they are not. But it grows tedious to continually hear well-meaning, but otherwise clueless, Westerners try to equate the two sides of this conflict. I am past tired of hearing white people passively whine, or shrilly demand, “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” With respect, just because some people have chosen to remain ignorant of the long and deep history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance – from the 1936 Boycott to Bil’in today – does not mean that it does not exist. The Free Gaza Movement struggles in solidarity with an already vibrant Palestinian civil resistance. Similarly, the other criticism of resistance – that it is futile – is equally mistaken. There is a widespread delusion among many that Israel and the Israeli lobby are simply too powerful to be challenged, let alone defeated. This is not the case. On June 30th 2009 Israeli Occupation Forces forcibly boarded one of our boats, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, and kidnapped 21 human rights workers and journalists who were on their way to deliver much needed humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to besieged Gaza, including Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. They were held in jail for a week before being deported. Though we were stopped on this particular voyage, it was not a “failure.” In the month after our boat was hijacked, over 100,000 news stories, essays, blog entries, action alerts, and radio and television segments were made on Israel’s violent response to our mission. It’s true that the ordeal of our 21 volunteers pales in comparison to the 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The seizure of our small cargo of 3 tons of medical aid and reconstruction kits is insignificant in light of the $4 billion (USD) of aid promised to Gaza – aid that has not and will not be delivered because of the Israeli blockade. But that too misses the point. By choosing to violently confront and kidnap unarmed human rights workers on a mission of mercy, Israel publicly demonstrated both the illegality and the absurdity of the Gaza siege. The siege is abjectly not about “security.” No one could possibly have believed that our small boat was a physical threat to Israel, This public demonstration of the siege’s illegality resulted in record action at the governmental level as well. Both the Irish and Greek governments formally intervened to protect their citizens and property. Despite having no diplomatic relationship and refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel’s government – the King of Bahrain personally & successfully intervened to force Israel to immediately release the five Bahraini human rights workers kidnapped from the SPIRIT. The British parliament held a formal debate on the issue, and even the U.S. State Department was forced to hold a national conference call on for family and friends of the kidnap victims, as well as for Arab-American civil rights groups. This was unprecedented, but it’s not enough. The Free Gaza Movement started our small part in this struggle in 2006. We began on hope alone. Many thought it couldn’t be done, yet we did it. We broke through the Israeli blockade. We will sail again, and we are absolutely determined to reach the Gaza Strip on our next voyage. We intend to non-violently escalate our response. By sending a cargo ship, we will escalate the challenge to the blockade by bringing in significant amounts of banned reconstruction materials. By sending more boats on our next mission, we will significantly escalate the logistical difficulties Israel faces should they decide to violently attack us again. By sending even more parliamentarians, dignitaries, journalists, and human rights workers to accompany the boats, we will significantly escalate the political difficulties Israel faces should they decide to violently attack us again. The journey to Gaza is dangerous. The Israeli navy rammed our flagship, the Dignity, when we attempted to deliver medical supplies to Gaza during their vicious assault in December/January. In June, they hijacked our small boat and kidnapped everyone on board. Israel has even threatened to open fire on our unarmed ships, rather than allow us to deliver humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to the people of Gaza. But the risks we take on our voyages are insignificant compared to the risks imposed every day upon the people of Gaza. The purpose of nonviolent direct action and civil resistance is to take risks – to put ourselves “in the way” of injustice. We take these risks well aware of what the possible consequences may be. We do so because the consequences of doing nothing are so much worse. Any time we allow ourselves to be bullied, every time we pass by an evil and ignore it – we lower our standards and allow our world to be made that much harsher and unjust for us all. Israel can threaten our boats and passengers – we will keep coming. Israel can illegally disrupt our communications and navigation systems – we will keep coming. Israel can open fire around our boats, or attempt to ram and sink them. Israel can choose to forcibly board and highjack our boats, and abduct our volunteers. It doesn’t matter. We will keep coming. Armed only with the love of justice, and in the rite of resistance – we will go to Gaza again and again and again, until this siege is forever shattered and the people of Gaza have free access to the rest of the world. Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American essayist and an organizer with the Free Gaza Movement. If you would like to support these efforts, please visit www.FreeGaza.org, or email donations[at]freegaza.org. If you would like to volunteer with Free Gaza, please send an email to volunteer[at]freegaza.org
I think it would be safe to say that virtually all Palestinians, including Hamas, would like to see Fatah’s upcoming Congress succeed in rehabilitating the movement, mainly by extricating it from the quagmire of corruption, treachery and “security coordination” with Israel, the Nazi-like occupier of our homeland and tormentor of our people.
Fatah is a large movement and its role in leading Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonialism can’t be denied. But it is also true that for many years Fatah has been metamorphosed into a “contra force” working, knowingly or unknowingly, against the national interests of the Palestinian people.
Fatah officials and spokesmen would vociferously deny such descriptions. However, the facts speak for themselves.
The ongoing inquisition against Hamas in the West Bank , which is fully coordinated with the Israeli occupation army, serves as a clarion proof underscoring to the extent to which Fatah has deviated from its original goals.
This disgraceful de facto alliance between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) against the forces of resistance effectively transforms the American-backed and American-funded security forces into a quisling entity, a Palestinian Judenrat.
I know the words might be harsh and painful, but truth must be told, even at the expense of upsetting and alienating many people. A painful treatment is often necessary to eradicate a malignant malady.
The original raison d’etre of Fatah had always been to liberate Palestine and enable Palestinian refugees, brutally uprooted from their ancestral homeland, to return home.
However, since the scandalous Oslo Agreement, Fatah’s main function has been redefined and re-oriented toward fighting “the enemies of peace” and “the extremists” in order to obtain a certificate of good conduct from the criminal Zionists and their western supporters and allies.
Many important but gullible Fatah leaders thought naively that Israel might award them a state in return for doing Israel ’s bidding.
However, instead of getting a Palestinian state with al-Quds as its capital, as the Olso-era mantra was constantly invoked, Israel dotted the West Bank with hundreds of malignant colonies, stepped up ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and nearly succeeded in redefining the Palestinian cause from a struggle against foreign occupation and apartheid into a Palestinian-Palestinian conflict between Fatah and Hamas. This scandalous Kafkaesque distortion of the Palestinian struggle wouldn’t have occurred had the free-minded Fatah leadership prevented certain thugs within the movement, who acted on America’s and Israel’s beck and call, from igniting inter-Palestinian civil war which eventually forced Hamas to oust the criminal provocateurs from the Gaza Strip.
We do hope that it is not too late for the free-minded forces within Fatah to rectify the situation and fix the immense damage done by the saboteurs and apostates who disguise themselves as Palestinian patriots while having the heart and mind of a traitor.
Today, Fatah faces a host of complicated problems endangering the very survival of the movement as a liberation movement.
First, Fatah must deal with the aftereffects of the death of Yasser Arafat who, despite all his mistakes and shortcomings, managed to preserve the cohesion of the Palestinian national movement.
Now, a new power structure has been created, a power structure that views national resistance against the Israeli occupation as anachronistic and even repugnant.
More to the point, this power structure would be willing to go to any extent to safeguard its criminal interests. Needless to say, the current police-state apparatus in the West Bank shows that the Ramallah junta and its numerous cohorts and hangers-on can’t be entrusted to deal with the national burden. They are simply too subservient to Israel and too enslaved by their own parochial interests to honestly represent the true collective conscience of the Palestinian people and its enduring struggle for freedom and Justice.
Hence, it is amply wrong for the free-minded forces within Fatah to think that the sole goal behind “security coordination” with Israel is to fight or eradicate Hamas.
In truth, the real goal is to intimidate, suppress and if necessary eliminate any opposition to any attempted liquidation of the Palestinian cause. Therefore, the free men and women within Fatah who might be tempted to say “NO” to an imposed deal, which would perpetuate the Israeli domination over Palestinian land and life , would be crushed by the faithless soldiers of Dayton who have been brainwashed into believing that the enemy of the Palestinian people is “Hamas and the forces of resistance,” not Israel.
Second, the free-minded forces within Fatah must also recognize that during the past few years a huge bureaucracy of Fatah officials, clerks, operatives, security commanders and business people whose interests and financial and economic well-being depend largely on the preservation of the status quo, namely the persistence of the master-slave relationship between Israel and the PA.
These people would fight tooth and nail to prolong or even perpetuate the present situation, namely PA subservience to and subjugation by the Israeli occupation.
One more point, it is an open secret that Fatah’s financial survival depends to a large extent on the coffers of the American-backed government of Salam Fayyad. Hence, any genuine effort by Fatah to deliver itself from the American-Israel stranglehold would be strongly resisted by the Fayyad government.
Indeed, there are those who believe that one of the main reasons for the creation of the Fayyad government is to emasculate and “domesticate” Fatah. Unfortunately, their view has been largely vindicated by events in the past few years.
This means that Fatah can’t exercise its free will, even if it wants to, as long as it remains financially dependent on the Fayyad’s government’s coffers. Which will eventually force Fatah to choose either of two choices, to coalesce into the PA government structure and kiss all pretensions about resistance good by, or be financially independent in order to be politically free and able to resist Israeli dictates.
In the final analysis, you can’t say “No” to the hands that feed you.
Fatah should devote itself to ending the rift with Hamas as soon as possible mainly by purging its ranks of Israel’s agents, and, sadly, they are many.
Fatah should realize that it alone can’t attain the goals of liberation and independence. This is why one of the central goals of the Fatah convention should be to mend relations with Hamas and restore Palestinian national unity
It is simply unacceptable and scandalous for a liberation movement to have some of its leaders telling Israeli occupation army commanders that “We are allies, and our goals are the same, and our common enemy is Hamas.” Some years ago, those uttering such words would have met a harsh fate.
This is why such people shouldn’t stay in their jobs, let alone in Fatah, for one minute.
In the final analysis, the real contradiction is between us, the Palestinian people, and Israel , the Nazi-like occupier of our country, not among ourselves. This is what every Palestinian, including every member of Fatah, ought to understand.
By Henry Makow Save the Males On Nov. 25, 1940, a boat carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, the “Patra,” exploded and sank off the coast of Palestine killing 252 people.
The Zionist “Haganah” claimed the passengers committed suicide to protest British refusal to let them land. Years later, it admitted that rather than let the passengers go to Mauritius it blew up the vessel.
“Sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice the few in order to save the many.” ~ Moshe Sharett, a former Israeli Prime Minister said at memorial service in 1958.
In fact, during the Holocaust, Zionist policy was that Jewish life had no value unless it promoted the cause of the creation of Israel. “One goat in Israel is worth more than the whole Diaspora,” Yitzhak Greenbaum, head of the Jewish Agency’s “Rescue Committee” said.
Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld accuses the Zionists of collaborating in the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry directly and indirectly.
Rabbi Shonfeld calls the Zionists “war criminals,” who usurped the leadership of the Jewish people, betrayed their trust, and, after their annihilation, reaped the moral capital.
Shonfeld states: “The Zionist approach that Jewish blood is the anointing oil needed for the wheels of the Jewish state is not a thing of the past. It remains operable to this very day.”
Other books by Jews on this theme include: Edwin Black, “The Transfer Agreement”; Ben Hecht, “Perfidy,” M.J. Nurenberger “The Scared and the Damned”; Joel Brand, “Satan and the Soul“; Chaim Lazar, “Destruction and Rebellion“; and Rabbi Michael Dov Ber Weismandel “From the Depth.”
The implication, which I will explore later, is that Zionism, at the top, is not a Jewish movement. In the words of veteran Israeli politician Eliezar Livneh, “The Zionist heritage had in it something flawed to begin with.”
SHOCKING ”HIGHLIGHTS” OF RABBI SHONFELD’S BOOK:
While European Jews were in mortal danger, Zionist leaders in America deliberately provoked and enraged Hitler. They began in 1933 by initiating a worldwide boycott of Nazi goods.Dieter von Wissliczeny, Adolph Eichmann’s lieutenant, told Rabbi Weissmandl that in 1941 Hitler flew into a rage when U.S. Zionist Rabbi Stephen Wise, in the name of the entire Jewish people, “declared war on Germany”. Hitler fell on the floor, bit the carpet and vowed: “Now I’ll destroy them. Now I’ll destroy them.” In Jan. 1942, he convened the “Wannsee Conference” where the “final solution” took shape.
Rabbi Shonfeld says the Nazis chose Zionist activists to run the “Judenrats” and to be Jewish police or “Kapos.” “The Nazis found in these ‘elders’ what they hoped for, loyal and obedient servants who because of their lust for money and power, led the masses to their destruction.” The Zionists were often intellectuals who were often “more cruel than the Nazis” and kept the trains’ final destination a secret. In contrast to secular Zionists, Shonfeld says Orthodox Jewish Rabbis refused to collaborate and tended their beleaguered flocks to the end.
Rabbi Shonfeld cites numerous instances where Zionists sabotaged attempts to organize resistance, ransom and relief. They undermined an effort by Vladimir Jabotinsky to arm Jews before the war. They stopped a program by American orthodox Jews to send food parcels to the ghettos (where child mortality was 60%) saying it violated the boycott. They thwarted a British parliamentary initiative to send refugees to Mauritius, demanding they go to Palestine instead. They blocked a similar initiative in the US Congress. At the same time, they rescued young Zionists. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist Chief and later first President of Israel said: “Every nation has its dead in its fight for its homeland. The suffering under Hitler are our dead.” He said they “were moral and economic dust in a cruel world.”
Rabbi Weismandel, who was in Slovakia, provided maps of Auschwitz and begged Jewish leaders to pressure the Allies to bomb the tracks and crematoriums. The leaders didn’t press the Allies because the secret policy was to annihilate non-Zionist Jews. The Nazis came to understand that death trains and camps would be safe from attack and actually concentrated industry there. (See also, William Perl, “The Holocaust Conspiracy.’)
None of the above is intended to absolve the Nazis of responsibility. However the holocaust could have been prevented or at least alleviated had the Zionist leadership behaved honorably.
WHAT IS ”ZIONISM”?
Lord Acton said, “The truth will come out when powerful people no longer wish to suppress it.” Since Sept. 11, more and more people are turning to the “conspiratorial” or “suppressed” view of history.
WE also call it revisionism or revised history.
In 1891, Cecil Rhodes started a secret society called the “Round Table” dedicated to world hegemony for the shareholders of the Bank of England and their allies. These priggish aristocrats, including the Rothschilds, realized they must control the world to safeguard their monopoly on money creation as well as global resources. The same folks control the U.S. Federal Reserve and other major central banks.(The Rockefellers are the main shareholders but they serve the Rothschilds as they always have.)
They were united also by a commitment to freemasonry, which at the top, is dedicated to the destruction of Christianity, the worship of Lucifer, and the rebuilding of a pagan temple in Jerusalem. (THE NEW WORLD ORDER)They see most of humanity as “useless eaters” and pioneered eugenics to decrease population and weed out inferior specimens. The eventual annihilation of non-Zionist Jews was rooted in this English movement.
In 1897, the first Zionist Congress took place in Basle. In 1904, the founder of Zionism Theodore Herzl died at age 44 under suspicious circumstances. The movement was taken over by the Round Table. The purpose was to use it and Communism to advance their plan for world hegemony. During the same week in November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution took place and the Balfour Declaration handed over to Baron Rothschild promised Palestine to the Jews.
The Round Table group planned three world wars to degrade, demoralize and destroy mankind, rendering it defenceless. The Third World War, now beginning, pitted the Zionists against the Muslims.
The purpose of Zionism is to help colonize the Middle East, subvert Islam, and control the oilfields. For this reason Israel continues to receive blank checks. (One analyst estimates the US taxpayer has spent $1.7 trillion on Israel.) This is why the founding of Israel took precedence over the welfare of the Jewish people.
Israel has little to do with the Jewish people.
Zionism,
Communism,
Feminism,
Nazism,
Created by the same satanic cabal.
These ‘isms are all means to the final goal, a neo feudal global dictatorship. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover referred to this when he said: “The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists”.
As unwitting overseers, Israelis will continue as victims of “compulsory suicide.” Americans too are being fitted for this role. Sept. 11 was an example.
What I have been calling “compulsory suicide” is satanic “culling.” The constant reference by Zionist and other leaders to “blood sacrifice” refers to the practice of human sacrifice. Apparently energy is released when people are slaughtered. Recently U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said the Hezbollah owes the U.S. a “blood debt.”
Our rulers design wars as offerings to Lucifer.
They find slaughter and mayhem exhilarating,
as long as it is someone else who is sacrificed.
WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE JEWS?
For millennia, Jews owed their survival to their devotion to “Torah.” In the last century they have forsaken this portable spiritual home, and placed their faith in a tangible one, Israel.
Unfortunately, they have been duped.
Israelis are becoming unwitting overseers in the global plantation. American Jews, prominent in media, education, government and finance, are also unwitting instruments. They will take the blame for the real culprits, the shareholders of the world’s major central banks.
Mankind has been betrayed by its leadership. Of Jewish leadership, Israeli journalist Barry Chamish says: “The richest appoint themselves to the highest posts. Thus the greediest and most unscrupulous run the show. [They] … will sell their souls and those of their people for power and acclaim.” See Barry Chamish“Just as Scared, Just as Doomed.”
There are a few hundred thousand orthodox Jews like Rabbi Shonfeld who have always understood Zionism. They have always rejected the state of Israel and remained faithful to the Torah. They could form a core for a genuine Jewish revival. Their websites are www.jewsagainstzionism.com, www.jewsnotzionists.org. and www.netureikarta.org.
In conclusion, a satanic cult governs the world. These people hate God, hate mankind and want to destroy it. They believe the end justifies the means and are ruthless.
They use the Jews, and everyone else, as cannon fodder.
We are “children of the matrix,” duped, distracted, stunted and sacrificed. Without the vision provided by God, we are lambs being led to slaughter.
28/07/2009 … And the head of the Democratic Gathering MP Walid Jumblatt continues his “inclination”…
On Tuesday, Jumblatt spoke to Tunisian daily “Realites” and renewed his severe criticism of the “slogan” raised by his ally, the Future movement, stating “Lebanon First.”
Indeed, and according to Jumblatt, such slogan contradicts with the traditional role of Lebanon, believed to be the country of openness, interaction and affiliation within its Arab surrounding. Therefore, such slogan would be “silly and isolationist” in Jumblatt’s terms.
The Progressive Socialist Party leader went on to criticize some of the Christians, from his allies and rivals, claiming that they are still dreaming of establishing what he called “ghettoes” that would include large sections from the Christian community. Jumblatt said that raising the slogan of “Lebanon First” actually contributes in isolating Lebanon and cutting it off the world.
The Druze leader also had another opinion concerning the relations with Syria following years in which he used to criticize Syria and even “insult” Syrian prominent leaders. “I admit that I fell in the sin of the large number of harsh slogans against Syria,” he said. “However, I intend in the future to purify my relationship with Damascus on my way,” he added.
On the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) over the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, Jumblatt highlighted that the tribunal has become tantamount to a “nightmare” in the eyes of some Lebanese. He pointed in this context to the report published some months ago by the German magazine Der Spiegel, recalling that the mentioned article sought to cause a Sunni-Shiite confrontation. “This consolidates the belief that the STL is subjected to manipulation by certain strong powers,” he stressed.
Asked whether the Syrians are the ones behind Hariri’s assassination (a slogan Jumblatt used to adopt in the post-assassination phase), the Democratic Gathering leader quickly answered: “I don’t know anymore.”
Jumblatt concluded his interview with the Tunisian magazine by noting that he started to sense a new tone in the rhetoric of the head of the Future movement MP Saad Hariri, Rafiq Hariri’s son, saying that this new tone has nothing to do with insults and should be distinguished from the electoral campaign speeches. “I will seek to build the future from a centrist position and through returning to Kamal Jumblatt’s heritage and ignoring the war drums that are being beaten since a long time,” he added.
On June 20th 2009, Neda Agha Soltan was shot dead during the post-election protests in Iran. The protests occupied the largest news segments around the world, with analysts and commentators predicting the fall of the Iranian regime and the dawn of freedom breaking in “the axis of evil.”
Neda’s death became an icon of the Iranian opposition and a symbol for millions of people of the injustice of the Iranian regime and the defiance of the protesters. Neda’s death was put in context. It was taken from the personal realm of the death of an individual to the public realm of the just cause of a whole society.
On July 1st Marwa El Sherbini, an Egyptian researcher living in Germany, was stabbed to death 18 times inside a courtroom in the city of Dresden, in front of her 3-year-old son. She had won a verdict against a German man of Russian descent who had verbally assaulted her because of her veil. Her husband, who rushed in to save her when she was attacked in the courtroom, was shot by the police. Marwa’s death was not reported by any Western news media until protests in Egypt erupted after her burial. The reporting that followed focused on the protests; the murder was presented as the act of a “lone wolf,” thus depriving it of its context and its social meaning.
If the story refuses to stay buried, racist Jews work hard to demonize the victim (e.g., Rachel Corrie) or to blame the non-Jewish readers (e.g., the Holocaust), and no one is allowed to discuss the context of Jewish misbehavior
German and English-language coverage of the murder of Marwa el-Sherbini has yet to mention the efforts of Jewish racists like Henryk Broder and Ralph Giordano to create an environment of fanatic Islamophobia in Germany:
Because Jewish-dominated media disinform on all topics related to Jews, public discussion on the most important public issues is misguided, vacuous or irrational to the point of threatening democracy in the USA and throughout the world. The situation will only worsen until the US government
designates the IDF as a terrorist organization (as required by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution),
begins arresting or purging Zionists, and
starts seizing Zionist assets like major media corporations.
Classic Israeli Subterfuge When Israel is Wrong, attack the Victims.
Israel is all a dither because people are angry and outraged at the litany of Zionist rip offs, cheats, liars, spies, money laundering, scam artists, paid for politicians and theft perpetuated around the globe at the hands of none other than “Zionists” working for Israel. And as totally predicted, they fall on the never ending “Pity Party” call of “Anti-Semitism”
I’m not going to list the massive succession of events, but let’s just list a few of the major ones for the mindset. Bernie Made-Off, the 25 Million dollar Zionist scam on American Elderly, the AIPAC spies, the bought and paid for by Israel American Politicians, the Rabbis money laundering for Israel, the same Rabbis scamming and selling body parts from AMERICANS on the black market then using those funds for, you guessed it, Israeli Organisations they work for. It’s not anti-semitism, people are just sick and tired of Israel scamming America and other countries (witness their recent scam on Jordan) Israel cannot control and deflect away from it’s MANY crimes by calling those who are fed up “Anti-Semites” That tired old game has run it’s course. Instead of attacking the victim of Israels crimes, how about Israel for once take the moral high ground and admit what they have done and ask for forgiveness. Now there’s a novel thought! MORE after THIS:
WHIPPANY, N.J. (New Jersey Jewish News) — An unwritten commandment permeates many parts of American-Jewish society: “It shouldn’t be a shande for the goyim.”
Since the July 23 arrests of 14 Orthodox Jews on money-laundering charges, and a 15th accused of illegally buying and selling kidneys, the word shande — Yiddish for “shame” — has echoed in countless Jewish conversations.
So, too, have fears of anti-Semitism, calls for serious introspection, concerns about media coverage and even some suggestions that the insularity of the Syrian Jewish community may have contributed to the alleged lawbreaking.
Yeah, lets’ blame “Syria” shall we? Was Bernie Madoff Syrian? Were the Rabbis Syrian? Does AIPAC work for Syria? How many Syrian groups work in Washington or around the world? THERES MORE:
The Jpost reports the FBI are, you guess it…..”Anti-Semitic” ROFLMAO: “Regardless of the details of the case – I am not familiar with the precise charges and the evidence – you would never see the FBI and police behaving that way with Muslim sheikhs or Christian priests. It is so obvious that the whole thing is motivated by anti-Semitism,” he said.
This is beyond comprehension, Israel simply MUST get the words “Muslim and Christian” in the mix. One question, were ANY of these people Muslim sheikhs or Christian priests? Nope, they were Zionists WORKING for Israel. Now here’s the unvarnished truth; the world is sick of Foreign Israeli infiltration into every single aspect of our personal lives. From banking scams, to body parts, to politicians, to censorship of the media and online, to sucking the world into wars, to the Annual billions of taxpayer money, to the thousands of groups worldwide in every single country whose sole purpose is to advance the cause of a foreign country, it is not Anti-Semitism, we have had enough and want to be free from your world agenda. That is our right.
Even by New Jersey standards, Thursday’s roundup of three mayors, five rabbis and 36 others on charges of money laundering and public corruption was big. But what put this FBI dragnet head and shoulders above the rest are the charges of trafficking in human body parts.
According to a federal criminal complaint filed in district court in New Jersey, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn conspired to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. The cost was $160,000 to the recipient of the transplant, of which the donor got $10,000. According to the complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had brokered such sales many times over the past 10 years.
“That it could happen in this country is so shocking,” said Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the Red Cross.
No, it isn’t. When I needed a kidney several years ago and had no donor in sight, I would have considered doing business with someone like Mr. Rosenbaum. The current law—the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984—gave me little choice. I would be a felon if I compensated a donor who was willing to spare me years of life-draining dialysis and premature death.
The early responses to the New Jersey scandal leave me dismayed, though not surprised. “We really have to crack down,” the co-director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts told MSNBC. That strategy is doomed, of course. It ignores the time-tested fact that efforts to stamp out underground markets either drive corruption further underground or causes it to flourish elsewhere.
The illicit organ trade is booming across the globe. It will only recede when the critical shortage of organs for transplants disappears. The best way to make that happen is to give legitimate incentives to people who might be willing to donate. Instead, I fear that Congress will merely raise the penalties for underground organ sales without simultaneously establishing a legal mechanism to incentivize donors.
Al Gore, then a Tennessee congressman who spearheaded the National Organ Transplant Act, spoke of using “a voucher system or a tax credit to a donor’s estate” if “efforts to improve voluntary donation are unsuccessful.” After 25 years, it is clear they have been unsuccessful.
More than 80,000 Americans now wait for a kidney, according the United Network for Organ Sharing. Thirteen of them die daily; the rest languish for years on dialysis. The number of donors last year was lower than in 2005, despite decades of work to encourage people to sign donor cards and donate to loved ones.
Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) is circulating a draft bill (the Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act), cosponsored by Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.) and Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), to enable governmental entities to offer donor benefits while raising penalties for brokering. States could offer health and life insurance to living donors, or funeral benefits to families of posthumous donors. Donors could also be offered a tax credit or perhaps a very generous contribution to a charity of their choice.
The rewards could come from state governments or approved charities, not from individuals, and the organs would be distributed according to formulas already in place. That means organs will not be available only to the wealthy.
What Mr. Rosenbaum is accused of doing is indeed against the law, and if he is found guilty he will be held accountable. But his alleged actions were a symptom of a deeper problem: the dire organ shortage.
Congress must permit donors to accept third-party benefits for saving the life of a stranger. Otherwise desperate patients and donors will continue to be reluctant co-conspirators in crime.
—Dr. Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of “When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors” (AEI, 2009). She received a kidney from a friend in 2006.
Along with the various public officials and religious leaders arrested yesterday, 58 year old Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn was charged with trying to arrange a kidney donation for $160,000. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper- Hughes has investigated the illegal organ racket for almost a decade. She talks about how she blew the whistle on Brooklyn’s organ bazaar:
The mass arrests in the New Jersey corruption scandal last week were big news – in Israel. Images of prominent rabbis and Jewish businessmen being cuffed and arrested after morning prayers filled the front pages under headlines trumpeting the discovery of the “Jewish laundry” used to bribe prominent New Jersey officials allegedly using Israeli charities. In particular, Israeli commentators seized on the connection between several of those arrested and prominent figures in Shas, the ultra-orthodox Sephardi Torah Guardians Party, founded by the octogenarian Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who remains its spiritual leader.
Among those arrested on July 23 were Rabbi Eliahu Ben Haim and Rabbi Edmund Nahum, who are reportedly close to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his son, Rabbi David Yosef. Ben Haim and Nahum were allegedly major fundraisers for Shas and Yosef family networks of educational institutions. According to a report on Israeli television, Rabbi David Yosef was also said to have been the target of Solomon Dwek, the FBI’s chief informant, who asked the rabbi to help him launder a check for $25,000. David Yosef reportedly declined.
Leaders of Shas, which won 11 seats in the Knesset and is the fourth largest member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, told TIME the party has no connection to the scandal. Roei Lachmanovich, spokesman for Shas Party leader Eli Yishai, told TIME that fundraising by the American rabbis for Sephardi institutions in Israel did not mean they were connected to Shas. He said that Shas institutions – including the rabbinical schools, or yeshivas – received their budget directly from the Israeli government and denied that Shas had been involved in any money-laundering or illegal activity. Furthermore, he said that Rabbi David Yosef was not a member of Shas and did not represent the party. “Besides the fact that he is Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s son, he has no formal connection to the Shas organization,” said Lachmanovich.
One of those arrested was a Brooklyn man, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who was charged with trading in human organs. In Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox community this week, Rosenbaum, who claimed to be a real estate dealer, was described as a macher (fixer) who assisted renal patients in finding appropriate medical treatment in the United States. According to the official complaint, however, Rosenbaum planned to give an Israeli donor $10,000 and then charge the client who requested the kidney $160,000. The payment would be laundered through what Rosenbaum described first as a “congregation,” then as a charity. According to published reports, Rosenbaum ran the Brooklyn branch of Kav Lachayim, a charity for sick children that was once supported by convicted financier Bernie Madoff.
The Shas media reacted to the entire scandal with countercharges of anti-Semitism. Yitzhak Kakun, editor of the Shas newspaper Yom Le’Yom told the Jerusalem Post: “The FBI purposely attempted to arrest as many rabbis as possible at once in an attempt to humiliate them.” Meanwhile, Nissim Ze’ev, a Shas Knesset member, said, “The U.S. police are trying to make it seem as though there is some kind of Jewish mafia.”
This is not the first time, however, that the Shas party has been embroiled in a corruption controversy. Two Shas ministers have been convicted on corruption charges in recent years. Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, explains that some parts of the ultra-orthodox community tend to disregard secular law, despite a tenacious adherence to the minutest detail of Jewish religious ritual. Says Halevi: “You have a kind of borderless community that in its best expressions maintains international charity efforts that are second to none. But the dark side of this is a mentality that often too easily slides into rationalizations for acts that cannot be rationalized, with the idea that the end justifies the means. Here we are raising money for charitable institutions, and therefore we’re allowed to cut corners.”
Halevi adds: “There have been other examples in the past of drug-running happening under cover of certain religious institutions here. There have been too many examples of abuse in the past.”
The take down by the FBI of a group of Syrian-Jewish rabbis who have held fund raisers for the Binyamin Netanyahu coalition partner, the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, has highlighted the financing of the expansion of Jewish building in East Jerusalem, which is not recognized as part of Israel by the United Nations.
The key financier is a wealthy American Jewish bingo parlor and gambling tycoon named Irving Moskowitz, a noted neoconservative who has also backed such neocon operations as the Hudson Institute, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for Security Policy.
Moskowitz has also been responsible for purchasing land from Arabs mostly in East Jerusalem to turn the city into an exclusive Jewish city. More troubling for long-term Middle East peace is Moskowitz’s funding of the right-wing Ateret Cohanim movement, which seeks to tear down Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest shrine, also known as the Dome of the Rock, to rebuild the Jewish temple.
Of more immediate concern, however, is Moskowitz’s purchase of East Jerusalem’s Shepherd Hotel, which overlooks Mount Scopus, in 1985 and reportedly with the support of Henry Kissinger. The hotel, which is still considered the property of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and was seized as “war booty” after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, is at the center of the expansion controversy between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s government over plans to turn the hotel into apartments exclusively for Jews.
In a July 27 op-ed in the Jerusalem Post by Jeff Baraq, a former editor-in-chief of the newspaper, it is stated: “The fact is that while American Jews like Irving Moskowitz can buy land in East Jerusalem Arab neighborhoods, a Palestinian resident of, say, Sheikh Jarrah [where the Shepherd Hotel is located] cannot purchase an apartment in many parts of West Jerusalem, because the Israel Lands Administration, which owns the land, will only enter into a contract with Israeli citizens or persons entitled to citizenship under the Law of Return.” Noting the political instability of the Netanyahu government, Baraq titles his op-ed “Netanyahu Gov’t Unstable, Crisis With US Self-Inflicted.”
With Netanyahu coalition partner Shas now front-and-center in the Syrian-Jewish rabbi scandal, any new revelations about criminal activity by the party in the money laundering escapades in New Jersey and New York could bring down the Netanyahu government. WMR has learned from a White House press corps source that the hidden hand of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was behind the Justice Department’s move against the Syrian Jews, major funders of Shas, and was meant as a warning shot across Netanyahu’s bow of his increasingly precarious ship of state
BEIRUT (IPS) – Palestinian refugee Youssef Shaaban was released from prison early this month — after serving 16 years in a Lebanese prison for a crime he did not commit.
Shaaban was convicted by Lebanon’s Justice Council in October 1994 on charge of shooting and killing the first secretary of the Jordanian embassy, Naeb Imran Matiyeh. Eight years after the sentencing of Shaaban, a Jordanian court convicted two Jordanians for the same crime. The Jordanian prosecution made no reference to Shaaban’s alleged role in the assassination.
In 2007, the UN working group on arbitrary detention declared Shaaban’s continuing detention to be baseless. But Shaaban was denied the right to appeal. A Lebanese court rejected the sentence administered in Jordan on the pretext that it was dispensed by a foreign entity. He was released this year after being granted special pardon by President Michel Suleiman.
Shaaban told IPS he was tortured in jail. The torture methods included the “metal chair,” where he was forced to sit on a metal chair that put pressure on the spine. Other forms of torture were suspension by his feet, electric shocks, and denial of sleep.
Several Palestinian refugees have been detained for years without prosecution.
“My son Kassem was arrested in the wake of the Nahr al-Bared war between the Lebanese army and the Fatah al-Islam terrorist group in 2007,” says Dr. Lutfi Hajj Ahmad, member now of the Committee for the Parents of Nahr al-Bared Detainees. “He was 15 at the time.”
Hajj Ahmad was injured early during the fighting and had to leave the camp, while his family stayed on. “The day they were asked to leave by the army, my son went to look for water; he was left behind.” Kassem was injured in the fighting, and later arrested along with other members of Fatah al-Islam. He was released this month, says Dr. Lutfi.
“My son was soaked in gasoline, and then they threatened to set him on fire,” says Hajj Ahmad.
Jihad Kadi was arrested four months ago in the Beddawi refugee camp in north Lebanon. His brother Adnan says Jihad was accused of “giving aid to injured Fatah al-Islam fighters in 2007, two years after the end of the conflict.”
A mother of five living in Nahr al-Bared says her teenage son was arrested in 2007. “He has not been charged with any crime for over two years. I visit him every week in Roumieh; the trip is quite costly for me. We lost everything we had in the [2007] war. I now have to beg here and there for the weekly pittance that allows me to visit my son.” Hajj Ahmad says that some 30 people arrested during the 2007 war have not been prosecuted. A government source says that around 75 Palestinians were arrested on suspicion of being connected to Fatah al-Islam.
Article 108 of the penal code, which legislates detention periods, does not place a limit when it comes to crimes against the state’s security, says lawyer Paul Morcos. This section of the law was used against four Lebanese generals (Mustafa Hamdan, former head of the presidential guard; Jamil al-Sayyed, security services director; Ali al-Hajj, domestic security chief; and Raymond Azar, military intelligence chief) accused of conspiring in the 2005 killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
“While the text does not stipulate a maximum time period, the rule of law supposes a reasonable amount of time — one that takes into account the gravity of the offense and the possible repercussions of releasing the person accused of the crime,” says Morcos.
Hajj Ahmad says Palestinians have no access to Lebanese parliamentarians who often exert pressure on the government when a citizen is detained for a long period.
All rights reserved, IPS — Inter Press Service (2009). Total or partial publication, retransmission or sale forbidden.
Excellent article by Seumas Milne from the Guardian about the role Britain, the US and the EU are playing in kidnapping and torturing Hamas members and supporters in the West Bank – particularly General Dayton:
….highlights the scale of detention without trial in the West Bank — more than 1,000 political prisoners are reportedly held in Palestinian Authority jails – and extrajudicial killings, torture and raids on Hamas-linked social institutions by security forces trained, funded and organised by the US with Israel’s blessing.
Now, the article also mentions Fatah members being arrested, but lets be honest here. There has just been a war on Gaza in which collaborators once again played a big part. Said Siyam is widely believed to have been killed due to information relayed to Israel by an informer and some Fatah members have been found by Hamas to be collaborators. It all depends on who you believe, I trust Hamas’s judgement, they’ve been targeted since day 1 but have always strayed on the right path and they are devout Muslims – they would not torture and kill collaborators unless there is no doubt that they were traitors. Allahu Alam.
Since the first hour of the war of July 2006, Israel turned Lebanese civilians into the first targets of its aggression. More than 1,300 Lebanese men, women and children were killed by Israeli bombs and 4,000 were wounded. About 970,000 Lebanese got displaced out of a population of 4 million. Incapable to achieve a victory on the battlefield, Israel tried to bomb Lebanon into surrender and to get the Lebanese people to turn against Hezbollah but it failed in both goals. It is noteworthy to point out that the Bush government was also a direct responsible for these crimes because of the blank check that he gave Israel “to defend herself.”
On July 13, Israeli warplanes killed at least 47 Lebanese civilians, mostly children, in 50 airstrikes across Lebanon. A Muslim imam, his wife and 10 children were killed when an Israeli missile struck their home in the village of Dweir, near the town of Nabatiyeh, reported Agence France-Presse. Another family of seven, including a 10-month-old baby, was killed in a pre-dawn air raid in which four missiles struck their home in the village of Baflay, near the coastal city of Tyre, police said. “The first one they brought in was just three years old. They brought her in pieces. First her head and then her arms,” said a spokesman for the Sheikh Ragheb Harb Hospital, in the nearby village of Toul, to the British newpaper The Times.
On July 15, another awful massacre took place. Twenty seven people were burnt alive when an Israeli helicopter gunship launched some missiles on a convoy of families who were fleeing Israel´s attacks in the South to seek refuge in Beirut and the mountains. An Israeli missile hit a van that was carrying families having left the village of Marwaheen, killing 15 people and wounding 6. The Lebanese authorities had asked the UN to help evacuate about 160 people when they were in Marwaheen, but the UN peacekeepers refused to do so. Relatives then blamed the UN for these deaths and threw stones at UN peacekeepers when these arrived there with the dead bodies after the attack, agencies reported.
On July 16, in another attack on a house in Aitarun, an Israeli warplane killed 11 members of the al-Akhrass family, including seven Canadian-Lebanese dual nationals who were vacationing in the village. Among the victims were four children under the age of eight.
The most horrendous massacre took place on July 30 in Qana, where at least 28 people, including 16 children –some of them disabled- and 9 women died in an Israeli airstrike against a building where some dozens of refugees were sleeping. On 18 August, the funeral took place. The bodies were transported to Qana in refrigerated trucks from the southern port city of Tyre, where the dead had been kept since the July bombing attack. The coffins with the bodies of the victims were draped with Hezbollah´s yellow flags or Lebanese national flags. The bodies were then laid in individual graves, which had been dug in an open field, AFP pointed out.
“The Israelis are savages, they are heartless. They should fight against our combatants and not our children and our disabled people,” said Fatmeh Farhat, who lost several of her cousins. “I want to see them. I want to hold them,” a tearful, devastated Hala Shalhoub, whose two daughters, ages 1 and 5, were killed in the Israeli attack, told The New York Times.
Qana had been the scene of another Israeli massacre in 1996, when an Israeli artillery battery killed 106 civilians who had sought shelter in a UN base. More than half of those 106 were children. Shimon Peres, a Peace Nobel-Prize winner, was then Israel´s Prime Minister. Fatima Balhas then lost five children and her husband in 1996. “I am today witnessing another Qana massacre,” Balhas said shortly after the new Israeli massacre in July 2006. “This enemy does not know either mercy or human rights,” she told Reuters.
Naim Raga, the head of a civil defense team, told the British paper The Guardian that when the rescuers found the children´s bodies, “they were all huddled together at the back of the room… Poor things, they thought the walls would protect them.”
Muhammad Qassim Shalhoub, who lost his five children, wife as well as 45 members of his extended family, recalled the haunting nightmare. “Around one o´clock we heard a big explosion,” he told The Guardian. “I do not remember anything after that, but when I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and my head had hit the wall. There was silence. I did not hear anything for a while, but then heard screams.” Shalhoub tried to help his terrified children but could not due to the non-stop Israeli strikes. “I took three children out – my four-year-old nephew, a girl and her sister. I went outside and screamed for help and three men came and went inside. There was shelling everywhere. We heard the planes… It was dark and there was so much smoke. Nobody could do anything till dawn,” he said.
At the beginning, Israel cynically claimed that missiles had been fired by Hezbollah fighters from Qana as if it could have justified the massacre. Actually, the Israeli government was angry at its armed forces´s failure to achieve any military gains after three weeks of its bombing campaign across Lebanon. Israeli minister of justice, Haim Ramon, issued a warning that a large area in south Lebanon would be regarded by Israel as a war zone, and he advocated for bombing villages to facilitate the unsuccessful advance of the Israeli army. “These places are not actually villages. They are military bases in which Hezbollah fighters are hiding and from which they are operating,” he said. These lies were, however, dismissed by local residents and international aid organizations. “There were no Hezbollah rockets fired from here,” 32-year-old Ali Abdel told IPS. “Anyone in this village will tell you this, because it is the truth.” Lebanese Red Cross workers in the nearby coastal city of Tyre told IPS that there was no basis for Israeli claims that Hezbollah had launched rockets from Qana. “We found no evidence of Hezbollah fighters in Qana,” Kassem Shaulan, a 28-year-old medic and training manager for the Red Cross in Tyre, told IPS at their headquarters. “When we rescue people or recover bodies from villages, we usually see rocket launchers or Hezbollah fighters if they are there, but in Qana I can say that the village was 100 percent clear of either of those.”
The massacre of Qana triggered a global wave of condemnations against Israel. The Guardian recalled the Qana massacre of 1996 stressing that Israel´s policies had not changed although they had never yielded concrete results. In an article titled, “How can we stand by and allow this to go on?” Robert Fisk, a popular journalist for Independent, said: “You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage.” Also in the United Kingdom, David Clark, adviser for the Workers´ Party government, wrote that Israel had openly committed war crimes and that Blair and Bush were being hypocritical by not condemning all forms of terrorism, including Israeli state terrorism.
Some days after the massacre, some international newspapers revealed that the bombs used in the attack had been produced by the United States. The Guardian reported that the bombs were laser-controlled BSU 37/B bunker busters manufactured in the US. Another British paper, The Independent, also claimed that inscriptions on shrapnel found at the site of the attack indicated that the bombs were American. It is noteworthy to point out that the same type of bomb had been used in another attack the previous week that killed four disarmed UN observers. According to some sources, the Bush administration sent other 100 GBU-28 “bunker busters” to Israel after the Israeli aggression against Lebanon started on July 12.
In the 34 days of the war, Israeli attacks devastated Lebanese infrastructure, destroying many roads and most of bridges – including bridges in the South of the country connecting villages to their main roads. The entrances and exits of many towns and villages in the South were totally destroyed by the Israeli air force, leaving local residents as prisoners in them. The Al-Hilwah Palestinian refugee camp at Sidon, an orphanage and funeral became also “military targets” of Israel.
The southern suburb of Beirut, considered as a Hezbollah stronghold, was terribly bombed by Israeli warplanes. Israeli warplanes bombed Al Manar television station there wounding six people. Lebanese television stations also showed flames rising from a section of the Beirut airport, the country´s only international airport. The port of Beirut came under attack too.
Israel also launched air strikes against the north of Lebanon, including Tripoli, Lebanon´s second-largest city. Israeli aircraft destroyed radar installations in the ports of this city and also in Jounieh. In the town port of Abdeh, situated near Tripoli, 14 people were killed, including 9 soldiers. This showed that the claim that the goal of the Israeli offensive was only to destroy or weaken Hezbollah, but not the Lebanese state or army, was a blatant lie. Actually, Israel wanted to destroy Lebanon, a prosperous state in the region whose tourism industry is a direct competitor of Israel´s.
The bombing of petrol deposits and stations and electric lines were part of the Israeli plans for an exhaustive and systematic destruction. Blackouts became a common fact, especially in Beirut. Israel also attacked grain silos and food factories, including a dairy factory. The aerial and naval blockage prevented Lebanon from importing food and medicine, although some supplies could enter Lebanon from Syria. However, Israeli warplanes also bombed the main Beirut-Damascus road to disrupt this traffic.
The intentional and brutal calculated Israeli policy of targeting innocent civilians and civilian infrastructure in order to force the peoples of the region into submitting to Israeli dictates has been constantly used against the Palestinians ever since the Nakba of 1948, and was also put into practice in the July war and, more recently, in the Israeli offensive against Gaza. Israel has copied this doctrine from the Nazis, who used it in the territories that they occupied to crash the resistance. This brutal doctrine is now widely supported by most Israelis.
Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, denounced the Israeli attacks on Lebanon´s civilian infrastructure and population. AI said in a report on the Israeli campaign: “It included directly attacking civilian objects and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment by the Israeli armed forces, the country´s infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale,” the report said. “Statements from the Israeli military officials seem to confirm that the destruction of the infrastructure was indeed a goal of the military campaign. In village after village the pattern was similar: the streets, especially main streets, were scarred with artillery craters along their length. In some cases, cluster bomb impacts were identified.”
“Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground,” the report went on, “reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns as their inhabitants fled the bombardments. Main roads, bridges and petrol stations were blown to bits. Entire families were killed in airstrikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their villages. Scores lay buried beneath the rubble of their houses for weeks, as the Red Cross and other rescue workers were prevented from accessing the areas by continuing Israeli strikes… Houses were singled out for precision-guided missile attacks and were destroyed, totally or partially, as a result. Business premises such as supermarkets or food stores and auto service stations and petrol stations were targeted.”
Nevertheless, the horrendous destruction did not ruin Lebanon´s spirit. The presence of this spirit could be seen in each and every act of solidarity that Lebanese citizens showed towards their compatriots who became homeless. These gestures also proved that the will of the Lebanese people to survive and rebuild their nation was far stronger than the will of the Israelis to kill and destroy. The Lebanese knew that Israel has launched its aggression in order to set their country “back 20 years”. But despite this fact, there is no doubt that they firmly believed that no matter how hard their nation was hit, it would be able to once again rise up from the ashes.
With its attacks Israel also sought to punish civilian population and the Lebanese government in an effort to get them to turn against Hezbollah. However, the Israeli assault had completely the opposite effect to the one that they intended: Hezbollah became even more popular than before because the Lebanese realized that it was the main force standing up to the Israeli attackers. This popular support for Hezbollah was seen in the recent parliamentary election in which more than 92% of the Shiite community -which mainly lives in the South of Lebanon and the southern suburb of Lebanon, that is, the most devastated regions in the July war- voted for Hezbollah and its allies of the National Opposition.
Israel´s daily bombardment of civilian areas in Lebanon and the murder of many innocent people, including old men, women and children were war crimes and crimes against the humanity. The UN Human Rights Commission found that Israel has violated nearly all 149 articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention that governs the treatment of civilians in war and under occupation and in so doing is guilty of war crimes according to international law.
Therefore, Israeli military and political leaders should be prosecuted for them. “Many of the violations examined in this report are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility,” the Amnesty report said. After the Israeli war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza, many people in the world is now demanding the UN General Assembly act to establish a special International Tribunal for Israel that would use its authority to prosecute Israeli officials and military officers in the Hague if they can be brought there or in absentia if they cannot. The task of the international community must be now ensure that all those who are involved in brutal crimes and massacres are brought to justice
The July War Series, Part I – The US Involvement in the Israeli Aggression
19/07/2009 By Yusuf Fernandez July 19, 2009
One of the main losers of the 2006 July War was the United States and particularly the Bush Administration. The Bush government´s policies were framed by the pro-Israeli lobby and particularly the neocon gang -a group of extremist pro-Israeli individuals working in and out of the Administration. Neocons were the responsible for launching the Iraq war and those who persuaded an ignorant president to promote some crazy plans to “redraw” the Middle East and surrender it to Israeli hegemony. The first step in this process was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. After the invasion, the Bush Administration set up its following goals: the destruction of the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance and the weakening, or even invasion, of Syria and Iran. However, the things started to go wrong in Iraq, where the insurgency started a guerrillas war against the US troops and American casualties began growing. The insurgency frustrated all attempts of the US occupiers to establish security, rebuild infrastructure, or transport vital resources, such as the oil. When Hamas won the parliamentary election in Palestine on January 25, 2006, the Bush Administration got furious.
That summer, Lebanon then became the focal point. Presidente George W. Bush gave Israel green light to try to destroy Hezbollah as the first stage of a wider campaign against Syria and Iran. If this campaign were successful, the US and Israel could control the world´s most crucial natural resources and the growth of China, India, Germany and other potential rivals in the 21st century.
These plans were mentioned in a document “A Clean Break: New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was presented to Netanyahu when he became Israeli Prime Minister in 1996. Its authors included some notorious neocons such as Richard Perle, former Defense Department official Douglas Feith -who manipulated the US intelligence to try to justify the Iraq invasion from an Office in the Pentagon- and extremists such as David and Meyrav Wurmser. That document called Israel to “seize the initiative along its northern border” against Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.
According to several sources, the Israelis had originally planned to launch a war against Lebanon in September or October with the support of the Bush Administration. There were also domestic political considerations for the US support. Bush believed that a war in the Middle East some weeks before November´s congress election would strengthen Republican candidates.
However, Israeli Primer Minister decided to attack Lebanon in July and used the pretext of a military operation of Hezbollah which killed three Israeli soldiers and led to the capture of other two to initiate the war on Lebanon.
The Bush Administration welcomed the Israeli attack on Lebanon and made no attempt to conceal their involvement in the conflict. US journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article in the New Yorker, in which he claims that “President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah´s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran´s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.”
The New York Times revealed on July 21, 2006 that the Bush administration had rushed a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel to help it in its fight against Hezbollah. Therefore, US fingerprints were found all over the war, including on the July 30 massacre of civilians at Qana. Israel bombed Qana with US-made F-16 fighter planes, while a bomb fragment found at the Qana bombing site read, “Guided Bomb BSU-37/B”- which is produced by the Boeing corporation. The US supplied Israel with fuel for its military aircraft to the value of 210 million dollars immediately after the Israeli air force destroyed Beirut International Airport. It then provided it with satellite-inteligence and high-explosive bombs to pound buildings, bridges, roads and infrastructure, including telephone and TV transmission stations.
The World Policy Institute added: “During the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, Israel actually received more in US military aid than it has in US arms deliveries. Over this time period Israel received 10.5 billion dollars in Foreign Military Financing -the Pentagon´s biggest military aid programme- and 6.3 billion dollars in US arms deliveries. The aid figure is larger than the arms transfer figure because it includes financing for major arms agreements for which the equipment has yet to be fully delivered. The most prominent of these deals is a 4.5 billion dollar sale of 102 Lockheed Martin F-16s to Israel.”
The statements by US officials were full of hypocrisy and cynicism. While Israeli killing machine was bombing Lebanese cities and villages, destroying infrastructures and killing hundreds of helpless civilians, Bush insisted that “Israel has a right to defend herself.” Bush also blamed Iran and Syria for their support for Hezbollah at the same time that the US was giving all kind of advanced weapons and financial aid to Israel. In addition, Bush repeated once and again his ridiculous statements which described Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization.” As one political analyst said: “The poor man just does not get it.”
On July 17, the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, stated that the civilian victims of Israelis airstrikes in Lebanon were not “morally equal” to those who die because of “terrorist attacks.” “It is a mistake to ascribe a moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct resulte of malicious terrorist acts, the very purpose of which are to kill civilians, and the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths as a result of military action taken in self-defense” of Israel, he said.
The US Senate passed unanimously a resolution unconditionally supporting the Israeli aggression. This is not surprising taking into account that almost the entire US political class is under the control of the pro-Israeli lobby and its main organization, the AIPAC. Israel is the only state in the world imposing collective punishments on civilian populations and kill women and children without any restraint, knowing that the US veto is guaranteed.
On NBC´s “Meet the Press” programme, former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, far right wing extremist Newt Gingrich, not only defended Israel´s aggression and called for Hezbollah to be “cleared out” of southern Lebanon, but he also said that the events in Lebanon were part of a “new world war” against “terrorism” and “terrorist regimes” such as North Korea, Iran and Syria.
Actually, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as an opportunity to expand the conflict into Syria and achieve the long-sought “regime change” in Damascus. On 30 April, the Jerusalem Post hinted at the Israeli rejection of Bush’s suggestion of a wider war in Syria. “Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria,” the newspaper reported. However, Israel´s leadership rejected this US suggestion, according to Israeli sources. One Israeli source said Bush´s interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered “a stupidity” by some senior Israeli officials, especially at a time when Israel was seeing that it was incapable to defeat Hezbollah.
For her part, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Rice made a visit to Beirut while US bombs were falling on the Lebanese capital and other cities across the country. In Beirut, Rice reiterated the US support for the Lebanese government, which she considered to be anti-Syrian, at the same time that she was backing Israeli air strikes against Lebanon. Rice said that the criminal Israeli attack on Lebanon was the birth of a “new Middle East”.
She was right. The July War was the birth of a new Middle East but not that of the US and Israel were waiting for but a new Middle East, free from US and Israeli subjugation. The first surprised was that Hezbollah defeated Israeli troops killing more than 150 Israeli soldiers and destroying or damaging dozens of Merkava tanks. Also, the Resistance continued launching hundreds of rockets and missiles on Israeli targets until the last day of the war. The Israeli economic activity was disrupted in a large part of the occupied territories and hundreds of thousands of Israelies were forced to live in underground shelters. The Haifa port was also attacked. The image of a “victorious Israeli army” vanished in only some few days.
US analysts soon saw that Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria would not permit the United States or Israel to dictate their terms and conditions to them. In fact, the Israeli military defeat in Lebanon was strengthening Hezbollah in Lebanon and the whole Arab world, where the leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Nasrallah, was becoming the most popular personality. For its part, Syria, which had left Lebanon in 2005, was also seen as enhancing again its influence over its neighbour. Many Lebanese then understood that Syria was a necessary ally and the Arab strategic profoundness that they country needed.
At the same time, the American support for the Israeli aggression made the image of the United States in the world suffer massively. The US was seen as the force behind the criminal Israeli agression and responsible for repeated Israeli war crimes. In this sense, the Lebanon war destroyed any credibility of the US government in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Warren Christopher, former US secretary of state criticized what he said it was “a recipe for frustration and failure.” “Every day America gives the green light to further Israeli violence, our already tattered reputation sinks even lower,” he warned.
US support for Israel outraged the Lebanese population. A third of the Lebanese dead in the war were children under the age of 12. “We did not use to be against the Americans, but now we are. They are against us,” said Fatima Haider, a Lebanese who lived in the district of Ein el-Mreiseh in Beirut, to the Reuters reporter Tom Perry. She remembered that when a bomb destroyed the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, her family rushed to help American survivors. However, in the July war her home was destroyed by US-made bombs.
Many Lebanese understood that all US support for the so-called the “Cedar Revolution” only sought to eliminate Syrian influence over Lebanon, force Syrian troops to leave the country and destroy Lebanon as an independent and sovereign state and turn the country into a US-Israeli protectorate. In contrast, many of the naïve Lebanese that believed for a moment that the US Administration could have a sincere interest in promoting the democracy in its country, became outraged at American support for the Israeli aggression.
“America is being held responsible for Israel´s behavior,” Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution, told Reuters. “Arabs view her “new Middle East” talk with disdain.” “It is clear America´s support for Israel during the 34 days of bombing will not be forgotten.” said Fawaz Gerges, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, to ABC News.
Other Arab experts warned that Bush´s policies had created a new generation of Arab youth perceiving the US as an enemy and had left the US more isolated than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago. Even in Kuwait, the same people who had taken to the streets in 1991 to celebrate the exit of the Iraqi troops and waved US flags and pictures of George Bush father, were burning American flags and chanting “Death to Israel and America.”
All these factors meant a disaster for the US position, which was becoming weaker and weaker each day. This forced the Bush Administration to change its mind about a ceasefire, especially after some senior Republicans, including chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, Richard Lugar, and several members of the inner circle of the former president Bush father, such as Brent Scowcroft, who served under the first Bush administration as national security advisor, openly advocated for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon.
This new position was a fruit of the disappointment of the Bush Administration with the Israeli defeat in Lebanon. As the New York Times reported: “A senior administration official in Crawford, Texas, where Mr. Bush is on vacation, said that it increasingly seemed that Israel would not be able to achieve a military victory, a realization that led the Americans to get behind a cease-fire.”
Finally, the US plans were proven to be a complete failure. London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi said what the US Administration did not expect was that Hezbollah did not only survive but it also dealt a severe blow to Israel. “The past weeks of hostilities,” the paper insisted, showed that Hezbollah had managed to minimize its losses and that (political and military) situation was starting to favour the organization.” Therefore, “the longer the Israeli aggression, the more advantages for the resistance.” In this sense, “Israel´s failure in Lebanon was also the US´s failure”.
From the spewing mouth of the most hateful hater in the North continent, Alan Dershowitz, via Matt Yglesias, here
“The decision to circulate a 1941 photo featuring the Nazi dictator sitting with the then grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini is aimed at easing pressure on Israel over a construction project on land in annexed east Jerusalem once owned by the cleric, [an Israeli] official told AFP.”
GAZA, (PIC)– The general department for passports in the Gaza strip has revealed that many passports issued by the Ramallah authority were forged or carried repeated numbers.
The department in a statement on Tuesday said that it was ready to allow human rights organizations access to get acquainted with content of this file and the negative impact it carries on the reputation of Palestinian passports.
It called on those organizations to pressure Ramallah to respect the law.
The department had asked those organizations to support the just demand of Gaza people to obtain passports, which are not provided by Ramallah in a blatant disregard of the humanitarian and ethical aspects of depriving the people of their right to travel.
A Palestinian UN worker inspects debris after an Israeli air strike on a UN school in Gaza where civilians were seeking refuge, 17 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
This month marked six months since the “official” conclusion to Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, “Operation Cast Lead.” From 27 December to 18 January, the might of the one of the world’s strongest militaries laid waste to a densely-packed territory of 1.4 million Palestinians without an escape route.
The parallel propaganda battle fought by Israel’s official and unofficial apologists continued after the ceasefire, in a desperate struggle to combat the repeated reports by human rights groups of breaches of international law. This article will look at some of the strategies of this campaign of disinformation, confusion, and lies — and the reality of Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Very early on in Operation Cast Lead, the scale of Israel’s attack became apparent. In just the first six days the Israeli Air Force carried out more than 500 sorties against targets in the Gaza Strip. That amounted to an attack from the air roughly every 18 minutes — not counting hundreds of helicopter attacks, tank and navy shelling, and infantry raids. All of this on a territory similar in size to the US city of Seattle.
As the International Committee of the Red Cross noted in a report published in June, “during the 22 days of the Israeli military operation, nowhere in Gaza was safe for civilians,” with “whole neighborhoods” turned “into rubble.” With areas looking “like the epicenter of a massive earthquake,” there is still “half a million tons of concrete rubble” to clear. [1]
By the end of an assault which targeted schools, homes, mosques, university buildings, police stations, ministries and the legislative council building, 3,600 housing units were totally destroyed, 2,700 sustained major damage and 52,000 houses need minor repair, according to a joint UNRWA-UNDP housing survey.
Even though Israel had banned the international media from entering the Gaza Strip to see for themselves what was unfolding, enough visuals and testimonies were getting out of the fenced-in territory for Israel to have what it would call a “PR nightmare” on its hands. Israel’s spinners and spokespersons fell back on a stock set of responses and talking points.
Israel, they insisted, never targeted civilians — its military was the most moral army in the world going to extraordinary lengths to protect the innocent. Hamas, on the other hand, was cynically using human shields, firing rockets while hiding amongst their own people. Israel was said to be acting purely in self-defense — which country, we were asked, would passively tolerate such attacks on its own population?
This latter argument has been ably dealt with elsewhere; this article is more interested in what was happening on the ground in the Gaza Strip. [2] Here the claims of a cowardly terrorist army willing to risk the lives of their own compatriots is key: in order to maintain the fiction that the Israeli army does not target civilians or civilian infrastructure, there must be doubt cast on the “civilian” identity of the dead. So Palestinian fatality statistics are questioned or even scorned — are we sure the dead were civilians? And when this is harder to deny — when the morgues are full of women and children — then the fallback is that the amoral Hamas fighters are to blame for forcing Israel to kill these unfortunates.
Sometimes, however, there were specific incidents of sufficiently immediate shock value — even for the mainstream Western media — that simply repeating the standard propaganda lines was not good enough. In these cases, the Israeli army spokespersons would issue a series of conflicting statements of denial, admission, and counter-claim, all in the hope that enough doubt is sown as to draw the sting out of the charge being made.
Before looking at an example of this, there is one other public relations tactic worth examining, used by Israel’s defenders in the media during and after the assault — citing the Jenin “precedent.” In 2002, according to this standard propaganda line here reproduced in a 16 February Jerusalem Post editorial (“The first casualty of war: Truth”), “a grossly false narrative of massacre and massed [sic] killings was disseminated by Palestinian officials,” and now, in 2009 in Gaza, history was repeating itself, as “the figure ‘1,300 Palestinians killed, most/many of them civilians'” becomes “embedded in the public consciousness.”
The comparison with Jenin is instructive, but not in the way Israel’s propagandists suggest: like Gaza this year, Israeli war crimes are denied and obfuscated with a PR operation of moral bluster, claims and retractions. According to Israeli spin, Palestinian “atrocity propaganda” and claims of a massacre in Jenin were disproved when the facts became known. In fact, groups like Human Rights Watch concluded that “many of the civilian deaths” they documented “amounted to unlawful or willful killings by the IDF [Israeli army].” HRW estimated that from 52 Palestinian deaths, at least 22 were civilians “including children, physically disabled, and elderly people.” In the Western media, half a dozen victims in a high school shooting is a “massacre” — as are the suicide bombings inside Israel. But it seems Palestinians cannot be victims of a massacre; only “collateral damage.”
This Israeli narrative of the “false massacre” came in useful both in the immediate aftermath of Jenin, and for propaganda purposes during and after Operation Cast Lead. Writing for The Huffington Post on 13 April, Mort Zuckerman asked readers, “Remember another urban myth alleging thousands of citizens massacred in the battle against terrorism in Jenin in 2002 when it turned out no more than 54 died, most of them combatants?” Such an approach forgets Israel’s own role in spreading confusion about casualties, and more importantly does the crucial work of distracting from the documented atrocities.
A good example from Operation Cast Lead of Israel’s PR machine in action is what happened in Jabaliya on 6 January, when Israeli mortar rounds landed in a busy street outside a school run by UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestine refugees) sheltering those seeking a safe haven from the fighting. A number of people inside the school were injured, and dozens of Palestinians were killed and injured in the street.
For Israeli apologists this became a notorious example of the kind of deception they say is so prevalent. Canada’s Globe and Mail featured a story in February alleging that UNRWA officials had helped propagate the claim that Israeli fire had actually hit the school itself (“Account of Israeli attack on Gaza school doesn’t hold up to scrutiny,” 29 January 2009). Subsequently, newspapers like Haaretz and others led with headlines like “UN backtracks on claim that deadly IDF strike hit Gaza school” (3 February 2009).
The reality — which was even buried within the very same articles in many cases — was that UNRWA had always said the attack hit outside the school. In fact, the Israeli military itself, in the immediate aftermath of the strike, said that “it had been returning fire against Palestinian fighters who were shooting mortar shells from within the school” (“UN says school in Gaza where 43 died wasn’t hit by Israeli fire,” The Washington Post, 7 February 2009).
Jonathan Miller, a journalist with UK television’s Channel 4, did an excellent job of exposing this “manufactured controversy.” After noting that UNRWA had “said from the outset that the mortars hit outside the school,” Miller described how “another UN agency, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in one of its reports on daily incidents, erroneously stated that the mortars had actually hit the school,” something later clarified. (“A tale of two Gaza schools,” Channel4.com, 6 February 2009)
As Miller commented, Israel was “seizing on a minor error buried in an online publication by a UN agency” and using it as “a smokescreen” to divert attention from more serious incidents, such as the deadly white phosphorus attack “on the last day of the war at another UN-run school just 800 yards up the road.”
The one case of a clear lie was highlighted in the report of the UN committee set up by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to investigate attacks on UN property and staff during the hostilities, a 27-page published summary of which was sent to the UN Security Council in May. The first of 11 recommendations by the UN team calls for “formal acknowledgment by the Government of Israel that its public statements alleging that Palestinians fired from within the UNRWA Jabalya school on 6 January and from within the UNRWA Field Office compound on 15 January were untrue and are regretted.”
The truth of what happened in Gaza though has been emerging over recent months in various reports that catalog the multitude of crimes committed by the Israeli army. Crucially, what has been documented is not a series of individual mistakes or “bad apples,” but evidence of Israel’s systematic assault on the fabric of life in the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reported in March on fatalities during the offensive, confirming that there were over 1,400 Palestinians killed. Civilians made up 65 percent of the total, not including the 255 police officers killed by the Israeli army.
In April, Israeli human rights groups including B’Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel released a joint which said that “many civilians were killed in Gaza not due to ‘mishaps’ but as a direct result of the military’s chosen policy implemented throughout the fighting.” [3]
Earlier this month, Amnesty International published its own report into Operation Cast Lead, accusing Israel of committing “war crimes” and “acts of wanton destruction.” Amnesty insisted that the hundreds of civilian deaths “cannot simply be dismissed as ‘collateral damage’ incidental to otherwise lawful attacks – or as mistakes.” “Amnesty details Gaza ‘war crimes,” BBC News, 2 July 2009.
More evidence for the deliberate nature of the wide scale destruction has since emerged. On 23 April, Haaretz quoted “two infantry officers who held key positions during the fighting” who told how “we just leveled neighborhoods.” British journalist Peter Beaumont wrote in May of “the aftermath of a wholesale urban un-planning through military force.” (“Death and devastation in Gaza neatly filed and documented,” The Guardian, 29 May 2009). Returning some weeks later, he noted that Israel’s targets “suggested wider aims” than simply stopping rocket fire — “not least the dismantling of Palestinian institutions.” (“A life in ruins,” The Observer, 5 July 2009)
In June, the BBC reported on the struggle of Gazan industries to rebuild, featuring a family-owned food manufacturer. The businessman, Yaser al-Wadiya, had “photographs of caterpillar tracks amid the ruins of the biscuit factory, which he believes the Israelis finished off with bulldozers after hitting it from the air.” The same story then noted that “the UN’s top humanitarian official, John Holmes, has accused Israel of the ‘systematic levelling’ of Gaza’s industrial area.” (“Gaza industries struggle to rebuild,” BBC News, 26 June 2009)
With such a high proportion of civilian dead, it is no surprise that investigations into Israel’s operation in Gaza have turned up shocking stories — and asked difficult questions. In the introduction to Breaking the Silence’s collection of testimonies by Israeli veterans of the Gaza assault, the group highlighted how the “bad apples” theory was insufficient: “the massive and unprecedented blow to the infrastructure and civilians of the Gaza strip were a direct result of IDF policy.”
Just one month after Operation Cast Lead, Palestinian stories were being corroborated by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who said “there appeared to be a consistent pattern of Palestinian families being killed by Israeli tank shells fired into their homes, apparently as they approached windows or stepped on to balconies.” [4] A delegation of US attorneys visited the Gaza Strip and concluded that “Israeli forces” had indeed “deliberately targeted civilians” during the offensive. [5]
Palestinian testimonies have flooded in of crimes committed by the Israeli army in Gaza, and so have the investigations by human rights groups. At the end of June, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on the use by Israel of aerial drones in attacks that killed dozens of Palestinian civilians. HRW noted that the drones are “one of the most precise weapons in Israel’s arsenal” yet “killed civilians who were not taking part in hostilities and were far from any fighting.”
Also recently, Amnesty International’s detailed study on Operation Cast Lead included cases of “close-ranging shootings” by Israeli soldiers, most of which involved “individuals, including children and women, who were shot at as they were fleeing their homes in search of shelter.” [6] Others were simply “going about the daily activities.” The human rights body reiterated that “wilful killings of unarmed civilians are war crimes.”
A report into the number of children killed by Israel during the war on Gaza (over 300) showed that 38 percent of child fatalities were aged 0-11 years old. The “overwhelming majority” were “killed either whilst inside their own homes or within the near vicinity of their homes.” [7] Here is one story:
At approximately 16:00 on 5 January 2009, Amal Olaiwa and four of her children were killed in the kitchen of their home in Shijaiyeh in the east of Gaza City, when the house was struck by an artillery shell. The shell smashed through a bedroom window and landed in the kitchen, decapitating Amal Olaiwa and killing three of her sons and one of her daughters. Three other members of the Olaiwa family were injured in the attack, including Amal’s husband, Haider, and her eldest son, Muntasser, who both witnessed the attack.
The victims were identified as: Amal Olaiwa, age 40, Motassem Olaiwa, age 14, Momen Olaiwa, age 13, Lana Olaiwa, age 9 and Ismail Olaiwa, age 7.
Pausing on just some of the names of the victims is perhaps a good moment to make one final point. What the Palestinians ultimately need is not more reports, but action. The investigations are invaluable, of course, helping to show up the Israeli spin for what it is. But unless there is action by both the same civil society producing the evidence of war crimes, as well as the politicians, then we can be sure that more Palestinian names will be added to those of the Olaiwa family, and the hundreds more who perished in Gaza.
Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer whose articles have appeared in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’, The Electronic Intifada, the New Statesman, and many others. He is the author ofIsraeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide(Pluto Press). He can be contacted at ben A T benwhite D O T org D O T uk.
Ringworm and Radiation By Barry Chamish August 19, 2004 On August 14, at 9 PM, Israel’s Channel Ten television screened a documentary film which exposes the ugliest secret of Israel’s Labor party founders: the deliberate mass radiation poisoning of nearly all Sephardi youths of a generation.
“The Ringworm Children” (translated in Hebrew as “100,000 Rays”), directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, recently won the prize for “best documentary” at the Haifa International film festival, and in the past year has made the rounds of Jewish and Israeli film festivals around the world. But it had yet to come to Israeli television screens. The subject is the mass irradiation of hundreds of thousands of young Israeli immigrants from Middle Eastern countries — Sephardim, as they are called today. The story goes like this:
In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba, flew to America and returned with seven x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army.
They were to be used in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths to be used as guinea pigs. Every Sephardi child was to be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of x-rays through his head. For doing so, the American government paid the Israeli government 300 million Israeli liras a year. The entire Health budget was 60 million liras. The money paid by the Americans is equivalent to billions of dollars today.
To fool the parents of the victims, the children were taken away on “school trips” and their parents were later told the x-rays were a treatment for the scourge of scalpal ringworm. 6,000 of the children died shortly after their doses were given, while many of the rest developed cancers that killed thousands over time and are still killing them now. While living, the victims suffered from disorders such as epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic headaches and psychosis.
That is the subject of the documentary in cold terms. It is another matter to see the victims on the screen.
To watch the Moroccan lady describe what getting 35,000 times the dose of allowable x-rays in her head feels like. “I screamed make the headache go away. Make the headache go away. Make the headache go away. But it never went away.”
To watch the bearded man walk hunched down the street. “I’m in my fifties and everyone thinks I’m in my seventies. I have to stoop when I walk so I won’t fall over. They took my youth away with those x-rays.”
To watch the old lady who administered the doses to thousands of children: “They brought them in lines. First their heads were shaved and smeared in burning gel. Then a ball was put between their legs and the children were ordered not to drop it, so they wouldn’t move. The children weren’t protected over the rest of their bodies. There were no lead vests for them. I was told I was doing good by helping to remove ringworm. If I knew what dangers the children were facing, I would never have cooperated. Never!”
Because the whole body was exposed to the rays, the genetic makeup of the children was often altered, affecting the next generation. We watch the woman with the distorted face explain, “All three of my children have the same cancers my family suffered. Are you going to tell me that’s a coincidence?”
The majority of the victims were Moroccan because they were the most numerous of the Sephardi immigrants. The generation that was poisoned became the country’s perpetual poor and criminal class. It didn’t make sense. The Moroccans who fled to France became prosperous and highly educated. The common explanation was that France got the rich, thus smart ones. The real explanation is that every French Moroccan child didn’t have his brain cells fried with gamma rays.
The film made it perfectly plain that this operation was no accident. The dangers of x-rays had been known for over forty years. We read the official guidelines for x-ray treatment in 1952. The maximum dose to be given a child in Israel was .5 rad. There was no mistake made. The children were deliberately poisoned.
David Deri makes the point that only Sephardi children received the x-rays: “I was in class and the men came to take us on a tour. They asked our names. The Ashkenazi children were told to return to their seats. The dark children were put on the bus.”
The film presents a historian who first gives a potted history of the eugenics movement. In a later sound bite, he declares that the ringworm operation was a eugenics program aimed at weeding out the perceived weak strains of society. The Moroccan lady is back on the screen. “It was a Holocaust, a Sephardi Holocaust. And what I want to know is why no one stood up to stop it.”
David Deri, on film and then as a panel member, relates the frustration he encountered when trying to find his childhood medical records. “All I wanted to know was what they did to me. I wanted to know who authorized it. I wanted to trace the chain of command. But the Health Ministry told me my records were missing.” Boaz Lev, the Health Ministry’s spokesman chimes in: “Almost all the records were burned in a fire.”
We are told that a US law in the late ’40s put a stop to the human radiation experiments conducted on prisoners, the mentally feeble and the like. The American atomic program needed a new source of human lab rats and the Israeli government supplied it. Here was the government cabinet at the time of the ringworm atrocities:
Prime Minister – David Ben Gurion; Finance Minister – Eliezer Kaplan; Settlement Minister – Levi Eshkol; Foreign Minister – Moshe Sharrett; Health Minister – Yosef Burg; Labor Minister – Golda Meir; Police Minister – Amos Ben Gurion.
The highest ranking non-cabinet post belonged to the Director General of the Defence Ministry, Shimon Peres.
That a program involving the equivalent of billions of dollars of American government funds should be unknown to the Prime Minister of cash-strapped Israel is ridiculous. Ben Gurion had to have been in on the horrors and undoubtedly chose his son to be Police Minister in case anyone interfered with them.
Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan was rewarded for eternity with a hospital named after him near Rehovot. But he’s not alone in this honor. Chaim Sheba, who ran Ringworm Incorporated, had a whole medical complex named after him. Needless to say, if there is an ounce of decency in the local medical profession, those hospital names will have to change.
After the film ended, there was a panel discussion which included a Moroccan singer, David Edri, head of the Compensation Committee for Ringworm X-Ray Victims, and Boaz Lev, a spokesman for the Ministry Of Health.
TV host Dan Margalit tried to put a better face on what he’d witnessed. He explained meekly that “the state was poor. It was a matter of day to day survival.” Then he stopped. He knew there was no excusing the atrocities which the Sephardi children endured.
But it was the Moroccan singer who summed up the experience best. “It’s going to hurt, but the truth has to be told. If not, the wounds will never heal.”
There is one person alive who knows the truth: Shimon Peres. The only way to get to the truth and start the healing is to investigate him for his role in the mass poisoning of over 100,000 Sephardi children and youth.
But here is why that won’t happen. The film was aired at the same time as the highest-rated TV show of the year, the finale of Israel’s talent-hunt show: “A Star Is Born.” The next day, the newly-born star’s photo took up half the front pages. There was not a word about “The Ringworm Children” in any paper, nor on the Internet. Until now.
Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 27 July 2009
In a burst of uncharacteristic honesty, the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert asserted in 2007 that “[m]ore and more Palestinians … want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one … That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”
The apartheid paradigm here fearfully evoked by Olmert has crept slowly but surely into mainstream political discourse on the Palestine issue, but is still avoided by many who are otherwise supportive of the Palestinian cause.
This is because the paradigm seems to offer a hostage to fortune: it is too easy for Israel’s apologists to rebut it by instancing the many systemic differences between Israel and apartheid South Africa.
What has often been overlooked is that the UN General Assembly’s International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (November 1973) extended the term to “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa” while defining the crime in more general terms as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” Israel’s practices need not be compared with those of apartheid South Africa — which they often resemble — but evaluated on their own terms in the light of the Convention.
The UN itself contributed to the occultation of the Convention’s relevance by omitting it from its 2002 “Compilation of International Instruments,” apparently on the mistaken belief that with the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime it had become obsolete.
In 1987 the Israeli academic Uri Davis published Israel: An Apartheid State, following it in 2004 with Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within. In 2001 he founded the Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine (MAIAP). These hints were taken up by organizations like the Stop the Wall Campaign, which consistently proposed the apartheid paradigm as something more than a mere analogy with South Africa.
The “A-word” made a dramatic entry on the world stage with the publication in 2006 of former US President Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace not Apartheid which, however, used the term rather diffusely and fallaciously exempted “sovereign” Israel (as distinct from the West Bank and Gaza Strip occupied in 1967) from its application. Nonetheless, the term had entered the mainstream and now seems likely to stay there.
In this context, Ben White’s new book fulfills a consolidating role, drawing together the various strands of the apartheid debate within a number of different contexts. In his introduction White cites the UN Convention’s definition of apartheid and highlights a number of the “inhuman acts” that it cites, while underlining the differences as well as the similarities between the cases of Israel and South Africa.
While respecting White’s reluctance to over-elaborate, it might have been worthwhile to extend this chapter a little by, for example, stressing Uri Davis’ repeated emphasis that apartheid is in essence “the regulation of racism in law,” and not merely a catalogue of inhuman acts.
The first part of the book accurately traces the entire history of “the conflict” from 1897 (the first Zionist Congress) to the present in a mere 28 pages, a breathtaking achievement indeed. White is uncompromising and surely correct in seeing the apartheid paradigm at work from the foundation of Israel in 1948, and in diagnosing its premises in the utterances and machinations of the likes of Herzl (founder of political Zionism) and Ben-Gurion (Zionist “pioneer” and the first Israeli Prime Minister).
Part II characterizes the specificities of Israeli apartheid under 17 headings from “Israel a state for some of its citizens” through “The occupation” and “The separation wall” (apartheid, of course, being the Afrikaans word for separation) to “The fragmentation of Palestine.” White reminds us that “around half of the entire Palestinian population as a whole are not ruled by Israel at all: they are the refugees and their descendants who were denationalized, expelled and forcibly kept out of their homeland by the first, dramatic acts of Israeli apartheid.”
Part III is entitled, self-explanatorily, “Towards Inclusion and Peace — Resisting Israeli Apartheid.” White focuses first on organizations on the ground in Israel/Palestine — Adalah (the Legal Centre for Minority Rights in Israel), ADRID (Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced), ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), Popular Committees Against the Wall (particularly those in the Palestinian villages of Budrus and Bilin), and Zochrot (“remembrance” in Hebrew), “an organization made up of Israelis concerned with raising awareness of the Nakba amongst their own people” (Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” is the name Palestinians give to their forced expulsion from their homeland in 1947-48).
Next he turns to “International Solidarity,” concentrating on activities rather than organizations: boycotts, divestment, sanctions (three strategies often grouped together as BDS), protest and education, support for grassroots Palestinian and Israeli groups, and trips to the region, whether of a “fact-finding” or more committed nature.
In pondering “a different kind of future,” White stresses that there is no point in “trying to ‘undo’ things that cannot be undone.” He castigates rhetoric about a “two-state solution” or demands that Palestinians should “compromise,” as if the solution could by-pass the dissolution of Israeli apartheid. It is only by “guaranteeing the collective and individual rights of all the peoples of Palestine/Israel, that the people of the region can realize the kind of peaceful tomorrow previous generations have been denied.”
White concludes with an invaluable list of “frequently asked questions” plus their answers, and a useful glossary.
For all those engaged in the “cleaner struggle” against Israeli apartheid that Ehud Olmert so dreads, this little book is an invaluable tool. For those who simply wish to brush up rapidly on the facts of the Israel/Palestine issue, it is equally invaluable.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 