I hadn’t intentionally looked at the Jerusalem Post (5/3/2008) so I was taken by surprise by this leading article headed up by “the Iranian Threat”.
The story gives prominence to an Iranian politician asking the UN to investigate how a Zionist state was allowed to become a nuclear superpower. It then asks the question why nuclear wapons shouldn;t receive the same treatment as biological or chemical ones. Quite so!

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How can a nation that suffered a holocaust, and continue to remember it as a catastrophic part of their history, perpetrate such an act against other human beings? How can they do it and get merely apologetic noises from the likes of the UK government? These are the real terrorists and need to be seen and treated as such. Civilians, women and young children are killed with impunity daily. The following is from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign:
EMERGENCY ACTION: End Israel’s killing of Palestinians now! Lift the siege on Gaza!

Wednesday 5 March 1-2pm Parliament Square – Emergency protest.
Saturday 8 March 4-6pm opposite Downing Street
Write, email and phone your MP
Over the last week, Israel has killed 115 Palestinians in Gaza, including 63 on Saturday alone, and 350 wounded. A third of those killed were babies and children. Palestinians in the West Bank are also being shot and killed by the Israeli army, including a 19 year old student protesting near Ramallah against Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Israeli government is committing war crimes – and the British government must act now.
Rory McCarthy wrote in the Guardian on 3 March about one of the victims of Israeli fire: ‘Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor in the front room, Safa, aged 12 [his daughter]. There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die’. He continued: ‘At one point yesterday a crowd of several hundred mourners carried through the streets the body of a young infant girl, Salsabeel Abu Jalhoum, who died aged 21 months. There were many others, like Mohammed Maboheh, a boy aged 16, who was shot dead on Saturday morning while standing on his balcony in the Abed Rabbo district of Jamalia, and whose father was in intensive care last night with a bullet wound to the chest… and there were Eyad and Jacqueline Abu Shabak, brother and sister aged 16 and 17, shot dead around midnight on Friday in the front room of their home’.
Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz: ‘The IDF penetrates the heart of a crowded refugee camp, kills in a terrifyingly wholesale manner, with horrible bloodshed, and Israel continues to disseminate the lie of restraint’. And Dr Mustafa Barghouti has pointed out that “Israel is killing babies, children and entire families while the world remains silent. This very silence is enabling the Israeli crimes. It must stop.”
We need to send a clear message to Gordon Brown during Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons that the British government must take action to bring Israel to account. Contact your MP, write to the local and national press, and join us on Wednesday and Saturday.
Other recent press:
Haaretz: ‘Restraint’ is deceitful, and ‘forbearance’ is vain by Gideon Levy.
Even yesterday evening, after the IDF already had killed about 50 Palestinians, at least half of them unarmed, and including quite a number of women and children, Jerusalem continued to claim, “At present there will be no major ground operation.” It’s incredible: The IDF penetrates the heart of a crowded refugee camp, kills in a terrifyingly wholesale manner, with horrible bloodshed, and Israel continues to disseminate the lie of restraint. Two days earlier Israel killed more Palestinians than have been killed by all the Qassams over the past seven years. Among the dead were four children and an infant. The next day Israel killed another five boys. And who is the victim? Israel. And who is cruel? The Palestinians.

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Condoleeza Rice is desperate. A few weeks back she flew into London to press Gordon on the need to step up troops in Afghanistan. Don’t know if that’s why they sent Harry, who knows!? It’s the Washington Post’s view (3/3/2008) that interested me today indicating that the scene is shifting in Middle Eastern affairs, with the U.S. seemingly being moved out in the cold.
Egypt get U.S. aid, but as the Post points out it wasn’t Washington that called Cairo, it was Tehran. And there hasn’t been contact down that route for decades. No one has ever believed the Bush has any real interest in dealing with the key to peace in the region and everything that has happened since Annapolis, a PR job, points to moves backwards.

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Israel became a state because of a holocaust. “The Holocaust” some say, (supported by Oxford Dictionary entries,) there is only one Holocaust. What happened to a large number of colonised Africans and others, for example, they won’t put in the same league. Now an Israeli minister is threatening “shoah” (which refers to disaster or holocaust in Hebrew against Palestinian people.) To prove a point some 50 people, including civilians, women and children, died from attacks from the Israeli forces. We are able to watch a genocide unfold in front of us with our leaders struck dumb. Bush is allocating millions to Israel for “defense”
Yesterday in Birmingham we met at Birmingham’s Council House to discuss the 5 years which has elapsed since the unprecedented march which happened in London and simultaneously in other cities around the world. We considered well publicised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and “hidden wars” in Somalia and Pakistan. Every one of these has the hallmark of the US “war on terror” which although taking 9/11 as its justification predates this. Two of the speakers from the Lebanon and Somali had been branded “terrorists”. One protested that he “had never even killed a chicken” in his life. Ibraham Mousawi, who the Daily Mail attacked and opposition politicians called to prevent his entry into the UK, spoke of the double standards. He spoke as a Muslim who above all was a human being and called us all to promote human values. What a monstrous thing to do, to tell the truth about what is happening to Palestinians who resist the aggression of Israel and the US, aided and abetted – yes the shame of it!!! by New Labour.
It was considered that the demonstrations had led to the early departure of leaders such as Blair in the UK and Howard in Australia. If it brought a different order in Oz announcements such as the one to map Muslims in Britain, another highly provocative act defying belief, shows no lessons have been learned. At first Brown appeared to be moderating his language when he refused to repeat the slogan “war on terror”. Now, far from signaling a change to the totally insensitive approach which brands all British Muslims as potential, if not actual terrorists it repeats the glaring damage done under Blair. When such a proposal was made in the US there was uproar and the proposal was ditched. Evidently those in the UK now feel so threatened that they keep quiet. Is this what happened in Germany in the thirties when then no one even imagined what was about to take place.

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