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Al-Sistani slams Arab inaction on Gaza
Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:51:40 GMT


Top Iraqi cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has called for decisive action by Arab and Muslim states for an end to Israeli attacks on Gaza.

"Condemning what is going on in Gaza and supporting our brothers only with words is meaningless, considering the big tragedy they are facing,'' Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani said, in a statement released by his office in Najaf.

"Arab and Islamic nations need to take a decisive stance, now more than ever, to end these ongoing aggressions and to break the unjust siege imposed on the brave people of Gaza,'' the Ayatollah said .

Israeli air forces staged massive airstrikes against the Gaza strip on Saturday and Sunday, killing more than 300 people and injuring 1550 others.

Following the attacks, most Arab governments condemned the Israeli air raids and called for an immediate end to hostilities.

Their reaction, however, was similar to the stance they took after Israel attacked Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Despite their condemnations, Israeli officials later revealed that some influential Arabs states had supported their attack on Lebanon as it was launched with the aim of destroying the country's resistance movement of Hezbollah.

Ayatollah Sistani's remarks came as the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei called on the Muslim world to defend the people of Gaza.

All Muslims are obliged to defend the defenseless people of Gaza in any way they can; those killed on such a sacred path are indeed martyrs.”

Ayatollah Khamenei slammed the collaboration of Washington and Tel Aviv, the silence of international bodies, and the indifference shown by some Arab countries which have paved the ground for such atrocities.

"Surely the Egyptian and Jordanian nations and other Muslims feel furious over these killings that follow the long-time blockade which banned food and medicine deliveries (to the Strip)," said the Leader.

This is while media reports have given rise to speculations that Cairo helped Tel Aviv mislead Hamas officials about Israel's intention to attack the impoverished region.

Citing diplomatic sources, the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi reported Sunday that Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman had deceived Hamas into believing that Israel would not launch an attack on the Gaza Strip in the near future.

According to the report, the misinformation prevented Hamas from evacuating its security compounds and headquarters.

Meanwhile on Sunday, the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution demanding an end to the Israeli attacks, as the United States vetoed the motion, which was requested by members of the United Nations.

Since 1972, Tel Aviv's staunch ally the United States, has vetoed over 40 resolutions the council has tried to pass against the Israeli regime.

MSH/MJ/DT
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=79 ... =351020201

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The Palestinian story: Remember us
Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:55:08 GMT
By Anna Denise Aldis and Dex A. Eastman, Press TV

Remember us in Gaza on December 27, 2008 when at least 230 of us were slain as if we were the filth of the land.
When the passage of time finally brings the men of many lands to the tables of judgment, politicians from countries that have emboldened Israel with their silence will gaze into the eyes of delegations from around the world only to see the same eyes gazing back. Remember us for we may not be at that table.

There are reasons for this.

We were once free to roam the lands of our fathers, to feel happiness and to cry when in despair. From the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River was our realm, but how were we to know what they intended to do to our nation.

They provoked wars and committed the most terrible of sins against the Jewish population, but when it was time to compensate, they put the burden of their own wrongdoings on our shoulders. One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.

Everyone had a say, the then president of the United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the leaders of the Zionist movement and even the representatives of Anglo-Jewry opposed to Zionism. There was no need to canvass Arab opinion.

They sat at round tables, signed agreements, sent the text to other powers for approval but no one consulted us. Remember us the native people of the ancient land of Canaan, Palestine it was called.

We protested, signed petitions, held rallies but to no avail; the process of nullification had already begun. They had decided to create a 100% Jewish state for the Jews of the West who had suffered under anti-Semitism in Europe. Nobody asked whether we were even responsible for the anti-Jewish propaganda in Germany. Remember us who sought your helping hand when they threatened us with annihilation.

Why were we for decades the main victims of the horrific massacre of the Jews by the Germans, Rumanians and Hungarians?

United under the Zionist slogan of 'A land without a people for a people without a land', certain powers opened the floodgates by telling Jews that our land is one that lacks inhabitants and must belong to a nation with no land.

They helped the 1948 creation of Israel based on the 'Judenstaat' which had been envisaged in 1896 by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl.

Then the flood suddenly hit us. We were no longer welcome in our own homes, our own towns and villages and on our own lands. They tried to bribe us into leaving the land of our ancestors. They promised to pay for all our expenses for us to leave Palestine and settle in neighboring Arab states.

But how could we leave? How could we leave our homes, our lands, the graves of our fathers and the hopes of our children? How were we supposed to forget and make our children forget that we had roots in Palestine? We objected.

We knew our resistance would cost us dearly, but we were ready to save our lands from the foreign invaders. Those oppressed in the Holocaust were transformed into the tormenter of the Arab population in Palestine.

Remember us in 1948 in the unarmed village Deir Yassin where 254 of us men, women and children were awakened from our sleep with the sound of bombs ripping through neighboring houses. Irgun and Lehi terrorist groups had received orders to uproot us, the Arab population of the village.

They threw bombs into our houses and slaughtered all of us they could find. About twenty-five of us were brought out of our houses on a 'victory tour' and then to a stone quarry where they shot us in cold blood.

The Red Cross came to understand our fate when they looked into our lifeless eyes and at nearly 150 of our maimed bodies abandoned in a well.

Several of us survived to tell the story of this indelible blemish carved in the pages of Zionist history.

"I saw a soldier grabbing my sister, Saliha al-Halabi, who was nine months pregnant. He pointed a machine gun at her neck, then emptied its contents into her body. Then he turned into a butcher, and grabbed a knife and ripped open her stomach to take out the slaughtered child with his iniquitous Nazi knife," Halima Id, a survivor of the attack, told her sister later.

They failed to plant fear in our hearts for what is home if it is not to be cherished?

Remember us in 1953 in Qibya when our women were preparing meals for the men and children and nearly 600 Israeli soldiers moved toward our village. We heard explosions, screaming and artillery fire, but the collapse of our roofs and the following darkness was the last we saw.

The then commander of the "101" unit, Ariel Sharon, later said that his leaders' orders had been clear on how to deal with the village. "The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example to everyone."

Original documents of the time showed that Sharon personally ordered his troops to achieve "maximal killing and damage to property".

UN observers say they saw our bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of our demolished houses and that we had been forced to remain inside until our homes were blown up over us.

They then wished to deny us presence in neighboring Lebanon, which had allowed us refuge from the anti-Semitism victims turned against us.

Remember us in 1982 in Sabra and Shatila. The Israeli army watched as the murderers they had provoked against us entered our two Palestinian refugee camps in the southern outskirts of West Beirut.

Us women were lying in houses with our skirts torn up to our waists, our children with cut throats, rows of us young men were shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall.

Our babies were lying like discarded dolls on the streets, blackened because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition.

We were tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.

3,500 of us were slaughtered; some of us men as young as 12 or 13 were killed with our arms and legs wrapped around each other, picturing the agony of our death. All of us had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to our ears and entering our brains.

Award-winning Middle East correspondent Robert Frisk recalls that "On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the correct time, the second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last energies of its dead owner."

Remember us in 2002 in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin where hundreds of us were buried alive in our homes. Our bodies were crushed and smoldered by buildings when the heavily-armored Caterpillar D-9 tore down our homes, our shelters and all of our belongings.

The IDF was fulfilling the orders of the then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon who in 1956 vowed to "burn every Palestinian Child that will be born" in Palestine. "I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him".

They struggled for a fortnight to bury our bodies and the evidence of the atrocity. They piled us in houses and when the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building to bring its ruins down on our corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank.

Remember us in 2008 in the Gaza Strip where the bombs of hatred rained down on us to prove that world New Year celebrations have no meaning. They called into action F16 bombers and apache helicopters to put fear into the very hearts of our nation even though we had long been left with no real method of defense.

Over 230 of us were killed and 800 of us were wounded. Remember us!

Let world leaders hold imprecise debates about what constitutes a massacre. Let Israel and its allies cover up their crimes. You can even call the state built upon the ruins of our homeland 'the de facto democracy of the Middle East'.

But as our bodies lie in mass graves in our backyards, know that we are the children of Palestine -- a nation of people who as our last words utter the Muslim declaration of faith (Shahadatain) and pass on our mantle of resistance to the next forgotten person.

Remember us...

'The Palestinian story' is the title given to a series of articles that will look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a different perspective than that of mainstream media. 'Remember us' is the first part of the series. The writers have dedicated this article to the many Palestinians that have lost their lives in the deadly Israeli attacks on Gaza on December 27, 2008.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=79 ... id=3510303

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How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.

But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.

Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon's bloody "pacification", starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.

Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I'm talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the Israelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. "It's the most terrifying place I've ever been in," Said once said of Gaza. "It's a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa."

Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.

To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.

As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having "secret talks" – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.

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Raw Video Footage: Israel Bombs Gaza Market

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e21634.htm

This Video Shows The Reality Of Israel's Attack On Gaza. It Should only be watch by a mature audience

This video clip was taken with a mobile camera immediately after a terrorist Israeli air strike hit a busy market early on Saturday 03, Jan 2009, Gaza.

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The Rotten State of Egypt is too Powerless and Corrupt to Act

By Robert Fisk

January 04, 2009 "The Independent" -- There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" – the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut – and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now – after three decades of Hosni Mubarak – can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals – but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.

Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?

To admit that Egypt can't even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us.

Open the Rafah gate – or break off relations with Israel – and Egypt's economic foundations crumble. Any Arab leader who took that kind of step will find that the West's economic and military support is withdrawn. Without subventions, Egypt is bankrupt. Of course, it works both ways. Individual Arab leaders are no longer going to make emotional gestures for anyone. When Sadat flew to Jerusalem – "I am tired of the dwarves," he said of his fellow Arab leaders – he paid the price with his own blood at the Cairo reviewing-stand where one of his own soldiers called him a "Pharaoh" before shooting him dead.

The true disgrace of Egypt, however, is not in its response to the slaughter in Gaza. It is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society where the idea of service – health, education, genuine security for ordinary people – has simply ceased to exist. It's a land where the first duty of the police is to protect the regime, where protesters are beaten up by the security police, where young women objecting to Mubarak's endless regime – likely to be passed on caliph-like to his son Gamal, whatever we may be told – are sexually molested by plain-clothes agents, where prisoners in the Tora-Tora complex are forced to rape each other by their guards.

There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture. A young American doctor described to me recently how in a Cairo hospital busy doctors merely blocked doors with plastic chairs to prevent access to patients. In November, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported how doctors abandoned their patients to attend prayers during Ramadan.

And amid all this, Egyptians have to live amid daily slaughter by their own shabby infrastructure. Alaa al-Aswani wrote eloquently in the Cairo paper Al-Dastour that the regime's "martyrs" outnumber all the dead of Egypt's wars against Israel – victims of railway accidents, ferry sinkings, the collapse of city buildings, sickness, cancers and pesticide poisonings – all victims, as Aswani says, "of the corruption and abuse of power". Opening the Rafah border-crossing for wounded Palestinians – the Palestinian medical staff being pushed back into their Gaza prison once the bloodied survivors of air raids have been dumped on Egyptian territory – is not going to change the midden in which Egyptians themselves live.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary general in Lebanon, felt able to call on Egyptians to "rise in their millions" to open the border with Gaza, but they will not do so. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the feeble Egyptian Foreign Minister, could only taunt the Hizbollah leaders by accusing them of trying to provoke "an anarchy similar to the one they created in their own country."

But he is well-protected. So is President Mubarak.

Egypt's malaise is in many ways as dark as that of the Palestinians. Its impotence in the face of Gaza's suffering is a symbol of its own political sickness

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e21636.htm

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