Sides...

Sydney, Australia: A performer from the Belarus Free Theatre rehearses for a production of Being Harold Pinter [Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images]

hmm Angry Arab does not screw around:

From the Archives of New York Times

“Published: March 3, 1992

To the Editor:

Contrary to your report on the brouhaha in France stirred by medical aid for George Habash (news article, Jan. 31), Mr. Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was not “the first group to hijack aircraft in the late 1960′s.” Israel originated the practice in 1954.

On Dec. 8 of that year, five Israeli soldiers were captured in Syria, apparently retrieving eavesdropping equipment. On Dec. 12, Israeli jet fighters intercepted a Syrian civilian aircraft flying from Damascus to Egypt, claiming that the plane had violated Israeli airspace.

The following day you reported that this “development appears to have given Israel an unexpected position of strength for negotiating the release of Syria’s prisoners.”

Gen. Moshe Dayan was then Israeli Chief of Staff. The Israeli Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, wrote in his diary, “It is clear that Dayan’s intention . . . is to get hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus.”

Contrary to General Dayan’s hopes, no exchange took place. Prime Minister Sharett added that the United States State Department complained that “our action was without precedent in the history of international practice.”

SAM HUSSEINI

Associate, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
New York, Feb. 18, 1992″ (thanks Sam)

Posted by As’ad at 12:42 PM

Does. not. screw. around…

Origins of Terrorism in the Middle East

Who Started Terrorism in the Arab-Israeli Conflict?

Bombs in Cafes: first used by Zionists in Palestine on March 17th, 1937 in Jaffa.

Bombs on Buses: first used by Zionists in Palestine Aug. 20th-Sep. 26, 1937.

Bombs in Market Places: first used by Zionists on July 6th, 1938 in Haifa.

Bombing of Hotels: first used by Zionists on July 22nd, 1946 in Jerusalem.

Bombing of Foreign Embassies: first used by Zionists on October 1st, 1946 in Rome (against the British).

Mining of Ambulances: First used by Zionists on October 31st, 1946 in Petah Tikvah.

Letter Bombs: first used by Zionists in June 1947 against British targets in UK.

(for documentation, consult The Arab Women’s Information Committee and The Institute for Palestine Studies, Who Are the Terrorists? Aspects of Zionist and Israeli Terrorism, (Beirut: Insitute for Palestine Studies, 1972).

Posted by As’ad at 11:48 AM

***

Nor do the cartoonists … from the Independent on December 31 by Dave Brown:

.

If it’s not clear, he’s zipping his mouth shut.

Sorry to say that, as usual, we are on the WRONG side.  We are.  The only “side” I care to take (because it is all about power)  is the side of those under the bombs, the wounded, the dying, the dead.  The terrified.  One reason I reject this blackmail of “Support the Troops”… some of them fit inside my parameters.  Especially those shoved back into battle, plug full of psychotropics and other drugs. Or back door drafted for the third, fourth, fifth time..

But, no matter what, we are on the wrong side.

[I]srael’s disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a desire to forestall the political consequences — especially during an electoral campaign — of Israeli military casualties. It is also a clear indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life in general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, women and children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in balls of fire and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that it had already reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was “a subhuman existence,” the deliberate product of the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, before the election of Hamas. They are the same people whose political and human rights Israel has been stifling since the occupation of 1967 — 20 years before the creation of Hamas. They are the same people who were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 because, as non-Jews, they were inconveniently cluttering up the land that European Zionists wanted to turn into a Jewish state, no matter what the land’s actual population had to say about it.  ..snip..

The author goes on to quote Arnon Soffer, an Israeli “geostrategist” (I linked to two interviews JPost had with him – found via Tiny Revolution – a couple threads back):

If you think I’m stretching the point, I’m not. Listen to the words of Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much to help plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2004:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Sofer predicted.

“Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure on the border is going to be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

Sofer admitted only one worry with all the killing, which will, he says, be the necessary outcome of a policy that he himself helped to invent.

“The only thing that concerns me,” he says, “is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

**

From the link to photos that CSTAR provided the other night…

Palestinos que abandonaram suas casas para escapar da ofensiva israelense na faixa de Gaza acomodam-se em escola da ONU, em Jabalia [Hatem Moussa-05.jan.2009/AP]

I don’t know that this is the UN sponsored school that was hit, the one targeted was in the same Jabaliyah refugee camp,  I have read that there are at least 5 such schools in Gaza (which is all of 1.5 miles long and .5 wide)… but it certainly appears to be a refuge that the UN tried to offer,  on ordinary days.

On the wrong side.

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