Alternative News Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times for Tue, 18 Jul 2006

Dispatch from Palestine - Nablus: "It is our life"

Silvia Cattori
17 July 2006

Our friend Silvia Cattori sends this report from Nablus:

Every night the city of Nablus is shaken by the sounds of war, sounds that drive away sleep. One awakens with a start, not knowing if one has slept, not slept, or if we are in a waking nightmare. There is shooting, nearby explosions resonate, go off in the distance, and return as an echo. You don't know what is happening or where it is happening. At first, you are very worried, then you stop thinking about it. One waits for daybreak with resignation. The people around tell you it is like that every day of the year here in the district of Nablus, that nothing has changed since 2000, that it is simply part of the panoply of the war of terror waged by Israel, added on top of the countless other repressive measures.

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Hell

Henry See
18 July 2006
Signs of the Times

What do you do when the entire world is siding with murder? When the life of one Israeli soldier is worth more than the lives of an entire civilian population? Make that two civilian populations - Gaza and Lebanon. What do you do when the deliberate gunning down and bombing of villagers evacuating their town calls forth no shouts of protest, when the premeditated massacre of women and children is called "defence"?

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Appetite For Destruction: Neoconservative Guns and Poses

Adam Elkus,
17 July 2006

As the violence in both Gaza and Lebanon rages out of control, the apocalyptic and nihilistic urges of prominent neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, David Horowitz, and William Kristol has finally surfaced in full public view. They cheer on the increasing destruction and advocate for United States intervention against Syria and Iran, whom they view as the real powers behind Hezbollah and Hamas provocations against Israel.

Human Events' Joel Mowbray reports that Israel faces a "two-front" war against a common enemy, because "both Hamas and Hezbollah are funded by Iran, leaders for both receive sanctuary in Syria, and both have a common goal: elimination of the Jews and the establishment of an Islamic state."

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Israeli Diplomat: All Arabs are Terrorists

Monday July 17th 2006, 8:08 am
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire

Imagine a member of the KKK going on the Bill O'Reilly show and declaring all African-Americans are shiftless crackheads. Imagine the outrage and calls for Fox News to be investigated for promoting racism and hatred. Now imagine an Israeli diplomat going on Bill O'Reilly's show and declaring all Muslims are terrorists. In fact, this happened, and nobody is calling the diplomat, Dan Gillerman, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, a racist or are there demands Fox News be investigated for promoting racism and hatred. In Bushzarro world, it is fine and dandy to characterize all Muslims as terrorists.

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Israel Must concede

Professor Sattar Kassem

I know that the title is offending for Israel that has been all the time reminding everybody in the area of its uncontested strength. Things have changed, and Israel has no chance to win the war against Hizballah, and it is to the best of its interest to stop its attacks and resort to prisoner exchange negotiations. Hizballah is well-organized, well-disciplined, well-equipped, and, above all, strictly and willingly devoted.

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The Abyss Beckons

By Robert Parry
July 18, 2006

The Israel-Lebanon conflict has opened up a possible route for George W. Bush and his neoconservative strategists to achieve a prized goal that otherwise appeared to be blocked for them - military assaults on Syria and Iran aimed at crippling those governments. After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 - after only three weeks of fighting - the question posed by some Bush administration officials was whether the U.S. military should go "left or right," to Syria or Iran. Some joked that "real men go to Tehran."

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Israelis are dying: it must be an escalation

By Jonathan Cook
07/17/06 "Information Clearing House"

Here we go again -- another "serious escalation" has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. So what prompted the BBC's judgment that the crisis was escalating once more?

You can be sure it had nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country's south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or significance in this confrontation.

Nor is it the Lebanese roads and bridges being pounded into dust, the petrol stations and oil refineries going up in smoke, the phone networks and TV stations being obliterated, the water and electricity supplies being cut off. The rapid transformation of a modern vibrant country like Lebanon into the same category of open-air prison as Gaza is not an escalation in the BBC's view.

No, the BBC proffered a first, hesitant "escalation" on Thursday night when Hizbullah had the audacity to fire a handful of rockets at Haifa in response to the growing Lebanese death toll. The worst damage the Katyushas inflicted was one gouging a chunk of earth out of the hillside overlooking the port.

But the BBC felt confident to declare the escalation had turned "serious" on Sunday when Hizbullah not only fired more rockets at Haifa but one killed a group of eight railway workers in a station depot.

Now that Israeli civlians as well as Lebanese civilians are dying -- even if in far smaller numbers -- the BBC's battalions of journalists in northern Israel finally have something to report on.

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We're Being Set Up for Wider War in the Middle East

by Paul Craig Roberts07/17/06 "Information Clearing House"

The old adage, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" does not apply to Americans, who have shown that they can be endlessly fooled.

Neoconservatives deceived Americans into an illegal attack and debilitating war in Iraq. American neoconservatives are closely allied with Israel's Likud Party. In the past, some neocons lost their security clearances because of "mishandling" of classified information. According to Insight magazine, "the Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel. Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security clearance from dozens of Americans, mostly Jews, who either lived, worked, or have relatives in Israel."

Despite questions of dual loyalties, neocons hold high positions in the Bush regime. Ten years ago these architects of American foreign and military policy spelled out how they would use deception to achieve "important Israeli strategic objectives" in the Middle East. First, they would focus "on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." This would open the door for Israel to provoke attacks from Hezbollah. The attacks would let Israel gain American sympathy and permit Israel to seize the strategic initiative by "engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."

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The Jewish State's Final Solution: The Assault on Gaza

James Petras
Special to Canadian Dimension July 2006

"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." (Ariel Sharon, former Likud Party Prime Minister, Agence France Press, November 15, 1998).

"We must expel Arabs and take their place." (David Ben Gurian, former Labor Party Prime Minister, 1937).

"There's no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist." (Golda Meir, former Labor Party Prime Minister).

"Israel will create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to Jordan." (Yitzak Rabin, former Labor Party Prime Minister)

"You don't simple bundle people onto trucks and drive them away. I prefer to advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave." (Ariel Sharon, August 24, 1988)

"The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized...Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever." (Menachem Begin, former Likud Party Prime Minister).

"I believed and to this say still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." (Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister, to the US House of Representatives, June 2006)

"But this is not merely faulty reasoning; arresting people to use as bargaining chips is the act of a gang, not of a state." (Haaretz Editorial, June 30, 2006)

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"This is our war, too"

Gabriele Zamparini
July 17, 2006

How many babies has Israel slaughtered today?

REUTERS reports:

"An Israeli newspaper said Israel's offensive had so far destroyed a quarter of Hezbollah's fighting capabilities. [But the REUTERS continues] It has also killed 176 people and wounded more than 500, Lebanon's health ministry said. All but 13 of them were civilians. The dead include seven Canadians killed in a strike on a southern village on Sunday." [UPDATE - REUTERS: Israel's campaign has killed 203 people, all but 13 of them civilians, and wounded more than 500. Twenty-four Israelis have been killed in the fighting, including 12 civilians hit in rocket attacks.]

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