URUK Net 7 March, 2010: Gaza marks 1000th day of Israeli siege
Gaza marks 1000th day of Israeli siege
Ma’an News
March 7, 2010 – Protests against the crippling siege imposed on the Gaza Strip should spread across the world, said Palestinian lawmaker Jamalh Al-Khudari on Sunday, as the blockade enters its 1000th day. “The siege harmed the people, as well as the evironment, health, the economy and social life. It constitutes a serious attempt to suffocate the people and break their will,” Al-Khudari told reporters during a news conference. He announced that 500 Gaza residents have died as a result of the siege, most of whom were patients who could not recieve appropriate medical treatment…
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Were depleted uranium weapons used at Falluja?
Phil Twyford
March 7, 2010 – Five years after fierce battle battles left the Iraqi city of Falluja in ruins a surge in birth defects is raising questions about the weaponry used by US forces. A heart breaking report by the BBC’s John Simpson screened on TV One on Friday. Simpson talked to doctors in the Falluja hospital who estimate around 1000 birth defects per year. You can hear his BBC radio report here. Late last year the Guardian reported Iraqi doctors had recorded a 15-fold increase in deformities in infants over the past year. Local medics were not ready to blame the war saying that there were many possible causes but a committee of Iraqi and British doctors has petitioned the UN General Assembly asking for an independent operation to clean up toxic materials left over from war. The International Campaign to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) is concerned by the press reports and is calling on the US Government to clarify to what extent uranium weapons were used at Falluja, and to fund independent scientific research to establish the cause of the birth defects…
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UPDATE ON IRAQ’S ELECTIONS
Layla Anwar
March 7, 2010 – I am following the PRELIMINARY RESULTS via Al-Sharqiya TV special coverage of Iraq’s elections […] 1) Overwhelming majority win for the secular nationalist bloc Al-IRAQIYA in many provinces including NAJAF. 2) Serious warnings issued by that same bloc about fraud attempts – namely the filling out of empty voting cards, the extra ones that have been printed. see my previous posts and the voting cards of many who were unable to present themselves to the election centers due to threats, bombs, deliberately barred transport etc… Preliminary conclusion: This is a huge MORAL defeat for the Shiite parties and for Maliki in particular..
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UK government attempts to keep torture case secret
Afua Hirsch
March 7, 2010 – The government will attempt today to have a case about torture heard entirely behind closed doors in a move that some lawyers say would extend secrecy to a new area of hearings, overriding ancient principles of English law. This morning a case will come before three appeal judges in London in which seven men are seeking damages against the government for mistreatment during what they say was their “extraordinary rendition” and torture facilitated by the British security services…
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British forces accused of torture and murder as inquiry opens
Paddy McGuffin
March 7, 2010 – The long-awaited public inquiry into the alleged torture and murder of up to 20 Iraqis by British troops in Iraq gets under way on Tuesday. In May 2004 following a fire-fight known as the battle of Danny Boy in Maysan province, south-east Iraq, it is alleged that up to 20 prisoners, including the named claimant Hamid al-Sweady, were tortured and murdered at the British base Camp Abu Naji. The Ministry of Defence denies the allegations, made by the family of Mr Sweady and nine other men who claim they were tortured at the base, insisting the 20 men were killed on the battlefield. But lawyers for the claimants argue that post mortem examinations of the bodies showed signs of mutilation and point-blank executions…
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Netanyahu Re-igniting Religious War in the Holy Land
By Dr. Elias Akleh
March 7, 2010 – Netanyahu’s late decision to include the Islamic Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil (Hebron) and Bilal Mosque in Bethlehem to the so-called “Israeli list of national heritage sites” seems to re-ignite the spark of religious war between Jewish Israelis on one side and the Moslem Palestinians and the Islamic World on the other side. This decision came as a first step in adopting his plan of reviving and renovating Jewish sites throughout Palestine; a plan he announced in his speech at the Tenth Annual Herzliya Conference last month. This plan is aimed at connecting the young Israeli generations to the land as a counter measure to the numerous Palestinian NGO’s web sites and activities aiming at asserting the Palestinian roots and heritage to the land…
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The Israeli Occupation as an Apartheid System
Anna Macchi for the Alternative Information Center (AIC)
March 7, 2009 – The Israeli state is committing a crime of apartheid. Unfortunately there are two very big errors that people commit talking about Israeli apartheid: the first is that they base on a comparison with South Africa. South Africa is the historical place where even the word comes from, from the afrikaans language, but now the word “apartheid” is a crime that any state can commit, like genocide. It has an international definition that we can find in the international convention for the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid…
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Video: The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem
The Alternative Information Center (AIC)
March 7, 2010 – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and other groups have filed a petition on behalf of the Palestinian descendants of those buried in an ancient Muslim cemetery, the Mamilla Cemetery, in Jerusalem. The petition, which was filed with several international bodies, urges Israel to: halt construction of the museum; investigate human rights violations; rebury human remains; and declare the Mamilla Cemetery a protected antiquities site…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63960
Gaza: random violence
Eva Barlett
March 7, 2010 – It was senseless, random, gratuitous violence against the farmers and their hopes. Bulldozer treads dug through bean and onion crops, in zigs and zags, seemingly without direction. Swaths of land were eaten by the military bulldozers’ blades, also seemingly randomly: the wheat crop which might mature to waist high if not bulldozed was left to grow, but the calf-high beans and onions were mowed, not fully but insultingly so. The 100 or so olive trees that had escaped the winter 2008-2009 Israeli massacre of Gaza and prior and later military invasions this time went with the 4 towering military bulldozers and 3 tanks…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63950
Iraq: From sectarian violence to secular democracy?
Firas Al-Atraqchi
March 7, 2010 – When millions of Iraqis head to the polls today, they will be standing at a crossroads. The decisions they make at the ballot box will determine whether Iraq is to remain in the grip of an extremist, religious culture of political zealotry, or be led by a nationalist and secular government. All the signs emerging from Iraq seem to indicate that nationalism and secularism may emerge as the winning mantras from the elections. The irony that is not lost on many Iraqis is that the country is struggling to return to a secularism that existed prior to the US invasion…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63949
Gideon Levy almost gets it
Jews sans frontieres
March 7, 2010 – …But Levy, who lives in Tel-Aviv and admitted voting for Tel-Aviv’s neo-liberal, people hating, lover of real-estate-developers mayor, is himself exhibit A in the story of the non-existent Israeli left, and precisely so because his sympathy for the Palestinian suffering is heartfelt and his hatred of the occupation genuine and uncompromising. Levy still doesn’t get that a Ben Gurion, even a dead and outdated Ben Gurion, can never be a foundation for a left-wing movement. It is not enough to note that an “old fashioned Zionism” has “run its course.” There can be no left without the understanding that that course, building in Palestine a European bourgeois capitalist Jewish nation state according to Zionism’s idea of normality, a state with “a Jewish thief and a Jewish whore,” namely, with a purely Jewish, yet complete and “normal” class structure, a state that, having indeed run its course, now imports thieves from Russia and prostitutes from the Balkan, and is epitomized today by the slick and corporate mayor of Tel Aviv, for whom urban renewal means getting rid of poor residents, was never, and could never have been, a left-wing project…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63963
Beit Ommar Blocks Route 60 in Protest of Israeli Co-optation of Religious Sites
The Palestine Solidarity Project
March 7, 2010 – Saturday, March 6–Beit Ommar, population 17,000, is located halfway between the cities of Betlehem and Hebron, both homes to religious sites significant to all three monotheisitic religions which have been the focus of a new move by the Israeli government to declare the sites “Israeli”. More importantly, both sites, the Ibrahimi and Belal Mosques, are located deep within Palestinian territory. At the beginning of March, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu declared the Ibrahimi Mosque (also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham is believed to be buried by Muslims, Christians, and Jews) in Hebron and The Belal Mosque (also known as Rachel’s Tomb, where all three monotheistic religions believe Rachel, the matriarch, is buried) in Betlehem to be Israeli national heritage sites…
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Hekmatyar’s Forces Battling Taliban Pledge to Join Karzai Government
By Rahim Faiez, Associated Press Writer
March 7, 2010 – Dozens of Islamist militants defected to Afghan government forces Sunday after armed clashes erupted between them and their one-time Taliban allies in a northeastern province, two police officials said. Fighters for the Hezb-e-Islami militia, loyal to regional warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, pledged to join the government while under pressure during the fierce fighting with Taliban militants in Baghlan province, the officials said…
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A tribute to Sarah Meyer
William BOWLES
March 5, 2010 – Sarah Meyer, 73, who published her work on Index Research, died on 4 March, 2010 from cancer. We hung out a couple of times, once at her little hideaway in the country and on demos, but most of our contact was via the Web and our related writings. An American ex-pat, her writing was exhaustive, thoroughly documented analyses on Iraq, Afghanistan and much more…
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Three NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan
AFP
March 7, 2010- Three NATO soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Sunday in separate incidents, the international force said, bringing the number of foreign troops who have died in the war this year to 117. One soldier was killed by gunfire and another by an improvised bomb in the south of the country, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement. The third soldier was killed by gunfire in the east. NATO did not give the precise locations of the killings, or the nationalities of the dead…
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Kazim al-Haeri’s Elections?
Reidar Visser
March 7, 2010 – Among the more overlooked aspects of the Iraqi parliamentary elections that take place on Sunday is the fact that Kazim al-Haeri, a hardliner cleric of Iraqi origin residing in Qum in Iran, enthusiastically supports participation. Haeri belongs to a particular class and generation of Shiite scholars: He is an old-school Khomeinist. Always loyal to the paradigm of wilayat al-faqih, he has written extensive treatises on the inviolability of the power of the supreme leader, not only inside Iran but throughout the Shiite world. He remained supportive of such views when Khamenei emerged as Khomeini’s successor in the first half 1990s; after 2003 he has formed an important (if not always stable) bridge between Iranian leaders and the Sadrists of Iraq. In this role, Haeri forms the juncture where orthodox Khomeinism and radical Sadrism of southern Iraq meet, and where Tehran has found its best vantage point for domesticating radical Iraqi trends and transforming them into tools of its own interests…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63955
Journalists, residents hurt in Beit Jala anti-wall rally
Ma’an News
March 7, 2010 – Three journalists and several demonstrators were injured by Israeli forces at a protest against Israel’s construction of the separation wall in the town of Beit Jala, north of Bethlehem, on Sunday. Some 200 local protestors attended the rally, with residents attempting to plant 30 olive tree seedlings on land overturned by Israeli bulldozers. They were prevented by Israeli soldiers and border guards deployed in the area. Clashes ensued when young Palestinian men began hurling stones toward Israeli forces, who responded by firing rubber-coated bullets and tear-gas canisters…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63952
DEAD JEWS GET PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT OVER LIVING MUSLIMS IN ISRAEL
Steve Amsel, Desertpeace
March 7, 2010 – Seventeen years ago digging was started just across from my home in Northern Jerusalem to lay a foundation for an overpass bridge that was being built. A few weeks into the project, some ancient graves were uncovered. Archeologists were called in and it was determined that these graves were of Jewish origin dating back to the First Temple Period. Within minutes of these ‘findings’ hundreds of ultra orthodox Jews began assembling at the site. Shortly afterwards there was an angry mob determined to make sure the graves would not be desecrated. The archeologists were keen on moving them to a museum to be put on display. The ‘mob’ would not allow that to happen…
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IRAQ: Exiled former Saddam Hussein aide says Baathist resistance is ‘ready to fight’
Stephen Starr
March 7, 2010 – Some in the United States harbor hope that Sunday’s elections in Iraq will help the country move away from its sectarian troubles and toward democracy. But according to one former aide to Saddam Hussein, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has already stolen Sunday’s election by destroying the Sunni Arab vote. “Maliki is trying to repress the entire Sunni population of Iraq by disallowing any Sunni candidate with even the remotest link to the Baath Party,” said Nizar Samarai, the director-general of the presidential office and an advisor to Hussein until the 2003 invasion of Iraq…
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63967
Military Resistance 8C3: The Bloody Hand – 5 March 2010
Thomas F. Barton
Thousands of US-led troops engaged in a major offensive to secure a Taliban bastion in southern Afghanistan are still facing four to six bomb attacks every day.
Crude bombs known as improvised explosive devises (IEDs) are the main problem facing the 15,000 US, NATO and Afghan troops as they consolidate control of the Marjah and Nad Ali areas of Helmand province.
Taliban insurgents, who for years controlled the poppy-producing area of the central Helmand River valley with drug traffickers, are still putting up some resistance.
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63962
Military Resistance 8C2: MAKE THEM PAY – 4 March 2010
Thomas F. Barton
Iraq War reports:
Insurgents Attack Government Offices In Baqouba
In Babil province south of Baghdad, police arrested 33 people for distributing leaflets calling for a boycott of the election because it is “supervised by the Americans,”
A car bomb wounded three soldiers when it exploded, targeting an Iraqi army patrol, in southern Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad.
Read the full article: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=63961
Hopefully Related posts:
- Breaking the siege – six ways you can get involved in the next convoy to Gaza
- URUK Net 23 March, 2010 Part 2: World Water Day: Thirsty Gaza residents battle salt, sewage
- URUK Net 14 March, 2010: Video: Charges on Gaza boy “human shield”
- URUK Net 17 March, 2010 Part 2: Video: Israeli Apartheid and The Nakba
- URUK Net 26 March, 2010 Part 2: Israeli MP demands an “emergency government” to intensify settlement activity
- ICH 23 March, 2010: Israeli MP likens British to “dogs” for Israeli expulsion
- URUK Net 11 March, 2010 Part 2: Dubai Investigation Exposes Israeli Ops in USA
- Latest from Free Gaza, approached by Israeli vessel
- URGENT ACTION NEEDED: ISRAELI TROOPS STORM GAZA FLOTILLA AND KILL 19: DEMONSTRATE TODAY
- URUK Net 26 February, 2010: Israeli forces commemorate Goldstein Massacre with tear gas and sound bombs