contributions

Thursday, April 12, 2007
There is a Palestinian farmer named Mohammed Abdel Aziz Sabatin who faces daily harassment from Israeli settlers from Bettar Illit. He has already lost much of his land due to the fact that it was confiscated to build the illegal settlement. Now, the settlers spend much of their time engaging in traditional Jewish cultural activities, like burning down his olive trees. The last time they tried it, the fire got out of hand, and the settlement itself had to send (…)

In a cover piece for the New Statesman, John Pilger evokes the memory of Germans ’looking from the side’ at Bergen-Belsen to describe the challenge facing us in the West as the Bush/Blair ’long war’ becomes ’perhaps the greatest crisis of modern times’. The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she says. "Then my mother saw these German women (…)

"Looking from the side."
It takes an Ozzie mainstream journalist in Britain to have the courage to warn us that Blair is conniving with the Bushistas to drag the West into an even more horrible war in the Middle East: in Iran.
"We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair ’long war’ edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation’s independence from rapacious America."
He uses a phrase, "looking from the side", used by a (…)

The expected invasion of the Kurdish held lands of Northern Iraq by Turkey, and as we had previously reported on in our March 20th report titled "Turkey Plans Iraq Invasion, Orders All Military Leave Cancelled", has begun, and as we can read as confirmed by the Assyrian International News Service in their report titled "Turkish Commandos Cross Into Iraq to Destroy Kurdish Terrorist Camps", and which says:
"The Turkish army crossed 20 kilometers into Iraq in an effort to destroy camps (…)

An explosion has hit a cafeteria at the Iraqi parliament, killing at least eight people, at least two of them MPs, the US military has said.
Police said they believed a suicide bomber was involved. Dozens more people were injured in the attack.
The cafe, in Baghdad’s highly fortified Green Zone, is for MPs and their staff, some of whom were having lunch there.
The suicide bomber was a man who allegedly went by the name of Guy Fawkes. Obviously Bush and Bliar have succeeded in passing (…)

A recent report by Europol revealed that there were 498 acts of terror in EU in 2006 and only of them could be blamed on “Islamists”. Even that one incident has not really been proven whether it was motivated by religious belief.
The first thing that comes to mind to the majority of Muslims when they hear that some bomb blast or some “suicide bombing” has taken place somewhere, is that this is a false flag operation, either by a local or foreign secret service operating in that country. (…)

The French subsidiary of US-based outdoor advertising specialist ClearChannel is facing industrial action over pay increases. Ironically, the company is in charge of putting up official election posters since it won a public tender in 2002.
Staff who have been picketing several depots for four days are threatening to disrupt the election campaign, although CearChannel France boss Vincent Piot has promised that the strike would not affect this aspect of its business.
French law provides (…)

As the election draws closer, Nicolas Sarkozy pushes further the conservative, right-wing agenda that has made him famous as interior minister. The man who once used to dub youths from disadvantaged suburbs "scum", promised to clean crime-ridden neighbourhoods with a "Kärcher" industrial pressure cleaner and forced a publishing house to cancel the launch of a biography of his wife Cécilia is at it again. Last month,he promised to establish a ministry of immigration and national identity if (…)

The aftermath of the captured Brit sailors business descended first into farce and then into a nauseating performance by pseud celebrity WRN, Faye Turney, denouncing the behaviour of her captors —"I thought they were measuring me up for a coffin" when they were measuring her for new clothes— and excusing her earlier confession by claiming, "I decided to play the dumb blonde."
She didn’t have to try very much.
Watching this spoilt, self-possessed, obese brat declaring to the world how she (…)

By Nicola Nasser*
The Israeli 40-year old military occupation and the more than a year old economic siege are eroding the national existence of Palestinians and squeezing the Palestinian leadership into an almost impossible mission of securing law and order by practically renewing an old plan thwarted because, in the end, it could not secure individual safety in the absence of national safeguards.
Controlling the security chaos is the second most important priority after lifting the (…)