Society's Child
In a letter, the first letter from an Iranian leader to a U.S. president in 27 years, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has offered President George W. Bush "new solutions" to their differences, said government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham.
The letter was sent via the Swiss Embassy.
"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." - Ariel Sharon, as Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.By now it should be clear to all Middle East analysts that the main impediment to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel and the right-wing Zionist extremists in Israeli politics. Time and again the Palestinians have expressed their sincere desire to end the inhuman conditions under which they are forced to live by the occupying IDF forces, yet every time that a peaceful settlement seems to be within their grasp, bizarrely, Hamas or Islamic Jihad decide to fire a few, usually harmless, Qasam rockets at an illegal Israeli settlement, or unknown "Palestinian gunmen" will murder an Israeli settler, inviting the IDF to retaliate with deadly and overwhelmingly superior force.
How to explain such repeated, apparently self-defeating acts by the alleged representatives of the beleaguered Palestinian people? It has been obvious for many years now that the Palestinians cannot win an armed conflict with the massively militarily superior Israel and any further attacks against Israeli forces, population or interests simply provide Israeli politicians with the justification to increase Israeli control and oppression in the occupied territories. And Israel's nukes ensure that no other Arab nation dare interfere. It is equally obvious that the international community has all but washed its hands of the conflict and is resigned to allowing it to play out to its final and surely tragic denouement.
In the so-called Katyn atrocities, personally ordered by Stalin in 1940, the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) killed 21,587 Polish Army reservists in cold blood on the grounds that they were "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority". Russia has refused to prosecute surviving suspects or reveal their names. It is keeping two-thirds of the files on the subject classified, and has classed the murders as an ordinary crime whose statute of limitations has expired.
Relatives of victims say that the killings amounted to genocide and that Russia has a moral obligation to open its archive on them.
Kendall-Smith is said to have told a pre-trial hearing last month that he refused to go to Iraq because he believed the war was illegal and he did not want to be complicit with an act of aggression contrary to international law. He reportedly said that he had "evidence that the Americans were on a par with Nazi Germany with its actions in the Persian Gulf. I have documents in my possession which support my assertions. This is on the basis that on-going acts of aggression in Iraq and systematically applied war crimes provide a moral equivalent between the US and Nazi Germany."
The plan would use a combination of financial incentives and penalties to expand access to health care over the next three years and extend coverage to the state's estimated 500,000 uninsured.
While emergency care is available, auditors noted that patients at two hospitals waited up to two hours to be unloaded from ambulances. They also found patients being kept and treated in the emergency room because beds weren't available elsewhere.
That's the question Palestinians should be asking themselves. Because the answer is no.
There is no way to make a nuclear bomb that just kills Jews. There is no way to "wipe Israel off the map," as Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sworn to do in a nuclear armageddon, without wiping out the Palestinians, as well.





