The Dignity has left Cyprus & should arrive in Gaza tomorrow around 10am (local). Watch here for updates and check the website, www.freegaza.org as well. Israel has declared Gaza a ‘closed military zone’, making sure no one can witness the atrocities. Our boat is going to challenge that closure.
This morning, six little girls in one family were murdered as they stood in front of their house. Israel says they don’t target civilians. They do.
20 children dead from Israeli fire on Gaza Share
Today at 12:07am Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Al-Mezan Center (Gaza) and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (Ramallah) Emergency Gaza Update 28.12.2008
– The health system in Gaza is in a state of collapse – A medical supplies store was bombarded today – Referrals to medical care outside the Gaza strip are suspended
Since the start of the Israeli military strikes against the Gaza Strip, true to Sunday, 16:00, 282 dead (including 20 children and 9 women) and about 700 wounded persons (including 130 children and 28 women) have been identified by Gaza hospitals, including more than 100 seriously wounded. According to local estimates, dozens are defined missing, presumed to be trapped beneath destroyed buildings.
29 December 2008
A wounded girl is carried to hospital after Israel’s attack on Gaza Photograph: Majed Hamdan/AP
So much has been written about the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip and by people with a far greater understanding of the reality of it than I, nevertheless I feel impelled to put pen to paper not only about our collective indifference to the wholesale slaughter being carried out in the name of the ‘chosen people’ but to the media’s ‘coverage’ that has been nothing short of scandalous and especially the BBC’s.
Israelis and Arabs “feel that only force can assure justice,” I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six Day War in 1967. And he wrote: “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”
The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government’s stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.
29 December, 2008
“What thou hast done to thyself none else did,
Thou has caused pain to the spirit of the Prophet
Ignorant of the witchery of the Frank (the west),
Behold the mischief hidden in his sleeve!
By his diplomacy all nations prostrate,
Unity of the Arabs crushed to pieces,
As long as they are caught in his vicious trap,
The Arabs shall not enjoy a moment’s peace.”
–Muhammad Iqbal, famed Pakistani Poet, “The Glory of Iqbal”, by Shakyh Abdul-Hanan Ali Nadwi“The Arabs are right when they paint America as a great Zionist conspiracy.”
–Douglas Rushkoff, New York University and other Schools, “Wrestling with Zion”, Grove Press, 2003
(Author of: Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism”, among many other books)“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”
– Edward R. Murrow, the famed CBS Journalist and Anchor
A precedent in criminality , barbarity and utter disregard for the most basic rights of the Palestinian people…
Calling the Islamic University a “key center of Hamas power” to justify its destruction is like calling the Hebrew University a key center of Israeli power and, by that, justifying blowing it up! The crucial difference, of course, is that the Hebrew University, along with all other Israeli academic institutions, is deeply and organically involved in perpetuating Israel’s occupation and apartheid.
This is a case of extrapolating “burning books” to the extreme. Has Israel learned anything from the demise of the once omnipotent Nazi Germany?
It is high time for a comprehensive boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. If not now, when?
Omar
29 December, 2008: The Newsletter of the Free Gaza Movement
www.freegaza.org/index.php?module=latest_news&id=ac9d8b63bd1ddbfb8a753adc3967b4d2&offset=
More than two-hundred, maybe three-hundred people have died in Gaza under the shelling of Israeli military jets. Hundreds are injured. This Sunday, the killing activities have continued. The wall between Gaza and Egypt has now been torn down by Gazans, according to international Human Rights observers witnessing and documenting the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Millions of people in the world are shocked, hurt, and angry about this “Guernica in Gaza”, as Vik calls it (see below). In Guernica, the civil population was punished for its democratic elections. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) also remembers this incident: “When Nazi planes firebombed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, to advance General Franco’s revolt against the democratically elected Republican government, Britain, France and other European powers continued to refuse military and political support to the Republic, and Franco and his Nazi allies prevailed.” (Source: www.bricup.org.uk/GazaEmergency.html).
(Larnaca, Cyprus 29 December 2008) – There is a time when silence is complicity and inaction is unacceptable. On Saturday, December 27, Israel began Operation “Cast Lead,” a military onslaught against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip that has – so far – massacred more than three-hundred men, women, and children, and seriously injured over a thousand.
In response to Israeli butchery, the Free Gaza ship, the DIGNITY, will depart Larnaca Port at approximately 5pm (UTC), on Monday, December 29, bound for besieged Gaza. The ship is on an emergency mission carrying in physicians, human rights workers and over three tons of desperately needed medical supplies donated by the people of Cyprus. Coordinating with the Gaza Ministry of Health, the doctors will be immediately posted to overburdened hospitals and clinics upon their arrival.
BRICUP is publishing the following Statement of Determination to Boycott Israel.
Please take up this statement and promote it wherever you can — in newspapers, professional and trade union journals, on internet sites.
Boycott is the key sanction we as citizens can apply to Israel. Palestinian organisations are appealing to us to do it. See http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/Gaza/HighFollowUp.pdf and http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/Gaza/BNC_Gaza.html
The New Dark Age 