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Israel Bombs Gaza - Hundreds Dead

some ppl have confusion regardign hamas starting this war first. that is not exactly how it is.
u should not forget there have been blockade by israel for last 18 months. even the UN was not given permission, despite israeli claims that everything is fine, to go to gaza and analyse the situation themselves. secondly when we were busy watchin US elections, on 4th israeli troops went into gaza strip and killed six palestineans. now after this what exactly do u expect? should ppl in palestine not retaliate with wateva means they have got? we all saw wat happened in kashmir few weeks back when an economic blockade was created. now y assume ppl in gaza should respond any differently?
 
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Israeli troops take grip on Gaza | International | Reuters

Israeli troops take grip on Gaza
Sun Jan 4, 2009 1:10pm EST

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli troops and tanks split the Gaza Strip and ringed its main city on Sunday in an offensive against Hamas that has killed more than 500 Palestinians, many of them civilians.

Israeli tanks poured shells and machinegun-fire into suspected militant positions and war planes as Hamas fighters fought back with mortars and rockets.

Hamas fighters kept up rocket salvoes against southern Israel, defying efforts by the Middle East's most powerful army to stamp out the threat Israel had set out to achieve.

European Union foreign policy chiefs launched a mission to seek a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip but acknowledged they faced a difficult task persuading the parties to stop fighting.

At least 42 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed on Sunday as Israeli shells slammed into houses and Gaza's main shopping district, medical sources said.

"We don't intend neither to occupy Gaza nor to crush Hamas, but to crush terror. And Hamas needs a real and serious lesson. They are now getting it," Israeli President Shimon Peres said in an interview on the ABC News program "This Week."

The Saturday night invasion of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip followed a week of Israeli bombardments from land, sea and air -- the most serious Israeli-Palestinian fighting in decades.

The Palestinian death toll tallied by Gaza medical officials in the nine days of "Operation Cast Lead" rose to 512. A U.N. agency said at least a quarter of the dead were civilians. A Palestinian human rights group put the figure at 40 percent.

One Israeli soldier was killed and 32 were wounded in the ground offensive, Israel said. Four Israelis have been killed by the Hamas rocket strikes since December 27.

Israeli officials said the offensive could last many days.

Calls for a ceasefire from the United States, Israel's main backer, other governments and the United Nations failed to gain traction over disagreements about who should stop firing first.

Israeli government officials said Israel had set several goals, including weakening Hamas by killing its fighters and destroying its rocket arsenal and establishing deterrence so the group would think twice before firing cross-border salvoes.

In addition, the officials said, Israel hoped to win international backing for new security arrangements along the Egyptian-Gaza border to prevent Hamas from rearming through tunnels, which have been bombed in the current campaign.

"The government did everything before deciding to launch the operation. This is an unavoidable operation," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said.
 
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^^^^^Voices are raising against her agression, with in israel...!!!

And there lie the bodies - Israel News

By Gideon Levy
04/01/2009


The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat. The obedient students did as they were told. Using logarithmic rulers, they sketched the design for a sophisticated pipeline. They meticulously planned its route, taking into account the landscape's topography, the possibility of corrosion, the pipe's diameter and the flow calibration. When they presented their final product, the professor rendered his judgment: You failed. None of you asked why we need such a pipe, whose blood will fill it, and why it is flowing in the first place.

Regardless of whether this story is legend or true, Israel is now failing its own blood pipeline test. As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.

They liquidated Nizar Ghayan? Nobody counts the 20 women and children who lost their lives in the same attack. There was a massacre of dozens of officers during their graduation ceremony from the police academy? Acceptable. Five little sisters? Allowed. Palestinians are dying in hospitals that lack medical equipment? Peanuts. Whatever happened to the not-so-good old days of Salah Shahadeh? When we liquidated him in July 2002, we also killed 15 women and children. At least back then, moral qualms were raised for a moment.

Here lie their bodies, row upon row, some of them tiny. Our hearts have turned hard and our eyes have become dull. All of Israel has worn military fatigues, uniforms that are opaque and stained with blood and which enable us to carry out any crime. Even our leading intellectuals fail to speak out on what havoc we have wreaked. Amos Oz urges: "Cease-fire now." David Grossman writes: "Hold your fire. Stop." Meir Shalev wants "a punitive operation." And not one word about our moral image, which has been horribly distorted.
The suffering in the south renders everything kosher, as if the horrible suffering in Gaza pales in comparison. Everyone is hungry for revenge, and that hunger is excused by the need for "deterrence," after it was already proved that the killing and the destruction in Lebanon did not achieve it.

Yes, I know, war is war. After all, they brought this on themselves. They are a terrorist organization and we are not. They want to destroy us and we seek peace. Still, is there nothing here that will stop this blood pipeline? Even those whose hearts are hardened by "moral righteousness" will have to momentarily halt the bombing machine and ask: Which Israel do we have before us? What will become of its standing in the world, which is now watching the events in Gaza? What are we inflicting on the moderate Arab regimes? And what of the simmering popular hatred we are sowing throughout the world? What good will emerge from this killing and destruction?

It is doubtful whether Hamas will be cut down to size as a result of this wretched war. Yet, the face of the state has been cut down to size, as have civilian elites who are apathetic and scared. The "peace camp," if it ever existed, has been cut down to size. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz authorized the Ghayan killing, regardless of the cost. Haim Oron, the leader of the "new left-wing movement," supported the launch of this foolish war.

Nobody is coming to the rescue - of Gaza or even of the remnants of humanity and Israeli democracy. The statesmen, the jurists, the poets, the authors, academe, and the news media - pitch black over the abyss. When the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel: The blood pipeline it laid has been completed.
 
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Why Israel went to war in Gaza 'Are you a target if you voted for Hamas?'

Last night Israel sent its ground forces across the border into Gaza as it escalated its brutal assault on Hamas. As a large-scale invasion of the Palestinian territory appears to be getting under way, Chris McGreal reports from Jerusalem on Israel's hidden strategy to persuade the world of the justice of its cause in its battle with a bitter ideological foe[/B]

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
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Sunday 4 January 2009


It is a war on two fronts. Months ago, as Israel prepared to unleash its latest wave of desolation against Gaza, it recognised that blasting Hamas and "the infrastructure of terror", which includes police stations, homes and mosques, was a straightforward task.

Israel also understood that a parallel operation would be required to persuade the rest of the world of the justice of its cause, even as the bodies of Palestinian women and children filled the mortuaries, and to ensure that its war was seen not in terms of occupation but of the west's struggle against terror and confrontation with Iran.

After the debacle of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon - not only a military disaster for Israel, but also a political and diplomatic one - the government in Tel Aviv spent months laying the groundwork at home and abroad for the assault on Gaza with quiet but energetic lobbying of foreign administrations and diplomats, particularly in Europe and parts of the Arab world.

A new information directorate was established to influence the media, with some success. And when the attack began just over a week ago, a tide of diplomats, lobby groups, bloggers and other supporters of Israel were unleashed to hammer home a handful of carefully crafted core messages intended to ensure that Israel was seen as the victim, even as its bombardment killed more than 430 Palestinians over the past week, at least a third of them civilians or policemen.

The unrelenting attack on Gaza, with an air strike every 20 minutes on average, has not stopped Hamas firing rockets that have killed four Israelis since the assault began, reaching deeper into the Jewish state than ever before and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing. Last night Israel escalated its action further, as its troops poured across Gaza's border, part of what appeared to be a significant ground invasion. And a diplomatic operation is already in full swing to justify the further cost in innocent lives that would almost certainly result.

Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN until a few months ago, was brought in by the Foreign Ministry to help lead the diplomatic and PR campaign. He said that the diplomatic and political groundwork has been under way for months.

"This was something that was planned long ahead," he said. "I was recruited by the foreign minister to coordinate Israel's efforts and I have never seen all parts of a very complex machinery - whether it is the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, the prime minister's office, the police or the army - work in such co-ordination, being effective in sending out the message."

In briefings in Jerusalem and London, Brussels and New York, the same core messages were repeated: that Israel had no choice but to attack in response to the barrage of Hamas rockets; that the coming attack would be on "the infrastructure of terror" in Gaza and the targets principally Hamas fighters; that civilians would die, but it was because Hamas hides its fighters and weapons factories among ordinary people.

Hand in hand went a strategy to remove the issue of occupation from discussion. Gaza was freed in 2005 when the Jewish settlers and army were pulled out, the Israelis said. It could have flourished as the basis of a Palestinian state, but its inhabitants chose conflict.

Israel portrayed Hamas as part of an axis of Islamist fundamentalist evil with Iran and Hezbollah. Its actions, the Israelis said, are nothing to do with continued occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza or the Israeli military's continued killing of large numbers of Palestinians since the pullout. "Israel is part of the free world and fights extremism and terrorism. Hamas is not," the foreign minister and Kadima party leader, Tzipi Livni, said on arriving in France as part of the diplomatic offensive last week.

Earlier in the week Livni deployed the "with us or against us" rhetoric of George W Bush's war on terror. "These are the days when every individual in the region and in the world has to choose a side. And the sides have changed. No longer is it Israel on one side and the Arab world on the other," she said. "Israel chose its side the day it was established; the Jewish people chose its side during its thousands of years of existence; and the prayer for peace is the voice sounded in the synagogues."

It was a message pumped home with receptive Arab governments, such as Egypt and Jordan, which view Hamas with hostility. "Large parts of the Muslim and Arab world realise that Hamas represents a greater danger to them even than it does to Israel. Its extremism, its fundamentalism, is a great danger to them as well," said Gillerman. "We've seen the effect of that in numerous responses, in the public statements made by [Egypt's] President Mubarak and even by [Palestinian president] Mahmoud Abbas and other Arabs. This is totally unprecedented."

Indeed, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said his government knew exactly what was coming: "The signs that Israel was determined to strike Hamas in Gaza for the past three months were clear. They practically wrote it in the sky. Unfortunately they [Hamas] served Israel the opportunity on a golden platter."

Also crucial was what was not said. Just a few months ago Livni was talking of wiping out Hamas, but that would be unpalatable to much of the outside world as a justification for the assault. So now the talk is of pressing Gaza's government to agree to a new ceasefire. Occasionally someone has got off-message. A couple of days into the assault on Gaza, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, said it would continue for "as long as it takes to dismantle Hamas completely". Infuriated Israeli officials in Jerusalem warned her that such statements could set back the diplomatic offensive.

In the first hours of the attack, Israel repeated the same messages to the wider world. Livni and the Labour defence minister, Ehud Barak, were widely quoted on international TV. The government's national information directorate sought to focus foreign media attention on the 8,500 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel over the past eight years and the 20 civilians they have killed, rather than the punishing blockade of Gaza and the 1,700 Palestinians killed in Israeli military attacks since Jewish settlers were pulled out of Gaza three years ago.

Lobby groups, such as the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom) in London and the Israel Project in America, were mobilised. They arranged briefings, conference calls and interviews. The Israeli military posted video footage on YouTube. Israeli diplomats in New York arranged a two-hour "citizens' press conference" on Twitter for thousands of people. At the same time, Israel in effect barred foreign journalists from witnessing the results of its strategy.

Livni has suggested that Israel's assault is good for the Palestinians by helping to free them from the grip of Hamas. "She's basically trying to convince me that they're doing this for my own good," said Diana Buttu, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's legal counsel and negotiator with the Israelis over the 2005 pullout from Gaza. "I've had some Israeli friends reiterate the same thing: 'You should be happy that we're rooting out Hamas. They're a problem for you, too.' I don't need her to tell me what's good for me and what's bad for me, and I don't think carrying out a massacre is good for anybody."

And when the killing started, Israel claimed that the overwhelming majority of the 400-plus killed were Hamas fighters and the buildings destroyed part of the infrastructure of terror. But about a third of the dead were policemen. Although the police force in Gaza is run by Hamas, Buttu said Israel is misrepresenting it as a terrorist organisation.

"The police force is largely used for internal law and order, traffic, the drug trade. They weren't fighters. They hit them at a graduation ceremony. Israel wants to kill anyone associated with Hamas, but where does it stop? Are you a legitimate target if you work in the civil service? Are you a legitimate target if you voted for Hamas?" she said.

Similarly, while Israel accuses Hamas of risking civilian lives by hiding the infrastructure of terror in ordinary neighbourhoods, many of the Israeli missile targets are police stations and other public buildings that are unlikely to be built anywhere else.

Israel argues that Hamas abandoned the June ceasefire that Tel Aviv was prepared to continue. "Israel is the first one who wants the violence to end. We were not looking for this. There was no other option. The truce was violated by Hamas," said Livni.

However, others say that the truce was thrown into jeopardy in November when the Israeli military killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid on Gaza. The Palestinians noted that it was election day in the US, so most of the rest of the world did not notice what happened. Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into Israel. Six more Palestinians died in two other Israeli attacks in the following week.

"They were assaulting Gaza militarily, by sea and by air, all through the ceasefire," said Buttu. Neither did the killing of Palestinians stop. In the nearly three years since Hamas came to power, and before the latest assault on Gaza, Israel forces had killed about 1,300 people in Gaza and the West Bank. While a significant number of them were Hamas activists - and while hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by other Palestinians in fighting between Hamas and Fatah - there has been a disturbing number of civilian deaths.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says that one in four of the victims is aged under 18. Between June 2007 and June 2008, Israeli attacks killed 68 Palestinian children and young people in Gaza. Another dozen were killed in the West Bank.

In February, an Israeli missile killed four boys, aged eight to 14, playing football in the street in Jabalia. In April, Meyasar Abu-Me'tiq and her four children, aged one to five years old, were killed when an Israeli missile hit their house as they were having breakfast. Even during the ceasefire, Israel killed 22 people in Gaza, including two children and a woman.

Perhaps crucial to the ceasefire's collapse were the differing views of what it was supposed to achieve. Israel regarded the truce as calm in return for calm. Hamas expected Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza that the latter said was a security response to the firing of Qassam rockets.

But Israel did not end the siege that was wrecking the economy and causing desperate shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Gazans concluded that the blockade was not so much about rocket attacks as punishment for voting for Hamas.

Central to the Israeli message has been that, when it pulled out its military and Jewish settlers three years ago, Gaza was offered the opportunity to prosper. "In order to create a vision of hope, we took out our forces and settlements, but instead of Gaza being the beginning of a Palestinian state, Hamas established an extreme Islamic rule," said Livni. Israeli officials argue that Hamas, and by extension the people who elected it, was more interested in hating and killing Jews than building a country.

Palestinians see it differently. Buttu says that from the day the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, they set about ensuring that it would fail economically. "When the Israelis pulled out, we expected that the Palestinians in Gaza would at least be able to lead some sort of free life. We expected that the crossing points would be open. We didn't expect that we would have to beg to allow food in," she said.

Buttu notes that even before Hamas was elected three years ago, the Israelis were already blockading Gaza. The Palestinians had to appeal to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, to pressure Israel to allow even a few score of trucks into Gaza each day. Israel agreed, then reneged. "This was before Hamas won the election. The whole Israeli claim is one big myth. If there wasn't already a closure policy, why did we need Rice and Wolfensohn to try to broker an agreement?" asked Buttu.

Yossi Alpher, a former official in the Mossad intelligence service and an ex-adviser on peace negotiations to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, said the blockade of Gaza is a failed strategy that might have strengthened Hamas. "I don't think anyone can produce clear evidence that the blockade has been counterproductive, but it certainly hasn't been productive. It's very possible it's been counterproductive. It's collective punishment, humanitarian suffering. It has not caused Palestinians in Gaza to behave the way we want them to, so why do it?" he said. "I think people really believed that, if you starved Gazans, they will get Hamas to stop the attacks. It's repeating a failed policy, mindlessly."
 
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^^^^^^^The U.S. and Israel share many things. A form of government, it is sometimes said; a set of ideals. But much more in the past ten years the U.S. and Israel have shared a fantasy. The fantasy says that use forces to destroy the muslim countries maximum and keep press by calling them "terrorists". It says we can end terrorism by killing all the terrorists.
The neighbors of the terrorists will be overawed. No new terrorists will be created. Finally, when every face on the president’s fifty-two card deck is crossed out and the known composition of Hamas is dead, we can “address the social conditions” that foster terrorism. But perhaps there are no such conditions. Do the terrorists not hate for hate’s sake?

The straightforward killing of enemies by a superior force where the victims are sparsely equipped and the odds one-sided. Much of the world is calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a massacre. While by contrast (As saari Khudai eik taraf -Juroo ka bahi eik taraf) the American press has been cleansed and euphemized. “3rd Day of Bombings,” said the New York Times headline on December 30, “Takes Out Interior Ministry.” Takes out. The same "Times" who paid an involuntary homage to George W. Bush: “I think it’s a good thing for the world that we took out Saddam Hussein.” Under that phrase are half a million Iraqis killed and a country destroyed. And for Israel in Gaza?:angry:
 
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Israel has yet to learn the US lesson, that the war on terror was a failure
Americans now realise that aggression fuels extremism. This offers Obama the chance for a new Middle East policy!


Gary Younge
The Guardian, Monday 5 January 2009
Article history

On New Year's Day Atif Irfan boarded an AirTran flight at Reagan National Airport in Washington with seven members of his family. Edging his way down the aisle, he wondered out loud to his wife whether the back of the plane was the best place to be. As they took their seats, his sister-in-law said she thought it was the safest part, rather than being close to the engine or wings "in case something happened".

The conversation was overheard by two teenage girls, who took one look at the mens' dark skin and beards and the women's headscarves and saw a family of suicide bombers, including three small children aged between two and seven. The girls told their parents; their parents told the flight attendant; the flight attendant told the air marshals and then the captain; the air marshals called the FBI and the airport police.

The pilot asked the marshals to remove the entire family from the plane. Then officials asked everybody else to get off so they could perform a thorough sweep. The family (as well as a family friend who happened to be on the same flight) was surrounded by armed guards, detained for questioning and then released. The plane eventually took off without them. When they tried to get on a later AirTran flight the airline refused to book them, even though they had been cleared (it has since apologised).

The Irfan family's ordeal escalated according to its own humiliating logic. And yet seven years after 9/11 it was no isolated incident. Pre-emptive, presumptive, disproportionate and discriminatory, it speaks volumes about the prevailing values those two American teenagers have lived with for much of their lives. A world that confuses Muslim and terrorist, and conflates the civilian and combatant by taking popular fear and prejudice and handing them over to state power. Driven by the maxim that you are better safe than sorry, it leaves nobody safe and everybody sorry. The only thing that prevented this particular incident from becoming yet another ideal metaphor for the war on terror is that nobody was killed or disappeared.

There is nothing particularly American about this. Like Nike or McDonald's, the war on terror may have started here but it quickly got branded and went global. In the months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, everybody wanted a piece of the action. President George Bush found himself in illustrious company. Among others, Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, and India's former prime minster Atal Bihari Vajpayee sought to ride his coattails to their own version of violent despotism.
However, few nations pursued it with such consistent zeal as Israel. "You in America are in a war against terror," Ariel Sharon said after he left the White House following suicide bombings in Haifa and Jerusalem in December 2001. "We in Israel are in a war against terror - it's the same war."
The trouble is that over the last seven years, the war on terror has been thoroughly discredited - not only morally, but militarily and strategically. Nobody listens to moderates, let alone to reason, when bombs are falling and people are dying. That is as true for the rockets that have killed a handful of Israelis as it is for the barrage of bombs and now tanks that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

By erasing any prospect of negotiation, the violence did not weaken extremists but emboldened them. Israel may want to boost the moderate Fatah faction which governs the West Bank now. But Hamas's electoral rise was a direct result of the contempt the Israeli's showed them in the past.

Meanwhile, the Iraq war has left Iran - the primary sponsor of both Hezbollah and Hamas - with far more influence in the region than they would have had. On almost every front in almost every part of the world, including in the US, the war on terror is now seen as a colossal mistake. Only Israel did not get the memo. And it is now set to fail for the same reasons that America has.

Diplomatically, Israeli efforts to sell its bombardment and now invasion of Gaza as a straightforward extension of the war on terror have been fairly blatant. It has described the shelling of homes, mosques and police stations as the destruction of "the infrastructure of terror". Even as the rest of the world condemns it, Israel's foreign minister, and Kadima party leader, Tzipi Livni, has been telling anyone who will listen that her country's actions place it firmly within the community of nations and leaves Gazans and their democratically elected rulers outside.:guns:
"Israel is part of the free world and fights extremism and terrorism. Hamas is not," she said. And from there we are just one small step away from putting the world on notice that either "you're with us or you're with the terrorists". "These are the days when every individual in the region and in the world has to choose a side," Livni said.:angry:

Meanwhile, Israel has been busy implementing the very tenets of the war on terror that have served the US so badly, primarily that intractable political problems can be solved solely by military means with the aim of not simply bombing your enemies into submission, but eliminating them altogether and then creating resolution on your own terms from the rubble.

"What I think we need to do is to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern," said Vice-Premier Haim Ramon. "That is the most important thing." Who he thinks should govern when Hamas has gone, and precisely what legitimacy they would have, does not seem to bother him. He does not want to change the government of Gaza, he wants to change the people.:crazy:
On this matter Livni is right. People do have to choose sides. But, so far, it has not been her side. Seven years after 9/11 the world has a good idea of what's coming next and how widespread the ramifications might be - and they want no part of it. The war on terror is over. War lost. For the first time in a long time, that even appears to be true in America.

A recent Rasmussen poll shows the American public far less indulgent of Israeli aggression than many previously believed. Opinion on the bombing of Gaza is fairly evenly divided, showing 44% supporting Israel's military action against the Palestinians and 41% saying it should have tried to find a diplomatic solution to the problems. :tsk::lol:

Given the absence of any honest or informed debate about events in the Middle East, this suggests significant room for manoeuvre for President-elect Obama in pursuing a more even-handed policy towards the region, if he should chose to take it.

The benefits could strengthen America's hand throughout the region. Majorities in seven Arab nations say their opinion of the US would significantly improve if it put pressure on Israel to comply with international law in its treatment of Palestinians - generally more than say the same about closing Guantánamo Bay, according to Gallup.:lol:
That is the change both America and the Middle East need. It's also the change most of the rest of the world wants to believe in.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk
 
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Obama is losing a battle he doesn't know he's in

The president-elect's silence on the Gaza crisis is undermining his reputation in the Middle East



Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 January 2009 15.55 GMT
Article history
Barack Obama's chances of making a fresh start in US relations with the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza. That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20. But foreign wars don't wait for Washington inaugurations.
Obama has remained wholly silent during the Gaza crisis. His aides say he is following established protocol that the US has only one president at a time. Hillary Clinton, his designated secretary of state, and Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect and foreign policy expert, have also been uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject.But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that cannot understand why, given his promise of change, he has not spoken out. Arab commentators and editorialists say there is growing disappointment at Obama's detachment - and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush's strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush's bias or simply does not care.
The Al-Jazeera satellite television station recently broadcast footage of Obama on holiday in Hawaii, wearing shorts and playing golf, juxtaposed with scenes of bloodshed and mayhem in Gaza. Its report criticising "the deafening silence from the Obama team" suggested Obama is losing a battle of perceptions among Muslims that he may not realise has even begun.:agree::angry:
"People recall his campaign slogan of change and hoped that it would apply to the Palestinian situation," Jordanian analyst Labib Kamhawi told Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune. "So they look at his silence as a negative sign. They think he is condoning what happened in Gaza because he's not expressing any opinion.":cry:
Regional critics claim Obama is happy to break his pre-inauguration "no comment" rule on international issues when it suits him. They note his swift condemnation of November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Obama has also made frequent policy statements on mitigating the impact of the global credit crunch.

Obama's absence from the fray is also allowing hostile voices to exploit the vacuum. "It would appear that the president-elect has no intention of getting involved in the Gaza crisis," Iran's Resalat newspaper commented sourly. "His stances and viewpoints suggest he will follow the path taken by previous American presidents... Obama, too, will pursue policies that support the Zionist aggressions.":agree::tsk:
Whether Obama, when he does eventually engage, can successfully elucidate an Israel-Palestine policy that is substantively different from that of Bush-Cheney is wholly uncertain at present.
To maintain the hardline US posture of placing the blame for all current troubles squarely on Hamas, to the extent of repeatedly blocking limited UN security council ceasefire moves, would be to end all realistic hopes of winning back Arab opinion - and could have negative, knock-on consequences for US interests in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf.

Yet if Obama were to take a tougher (some would say more balanced) line with Israel, for example by demanding a permanent end to its blockade of Gaza, or by opening a path to talks with Hamas, he risks provoking a rightwing backlash in Israel, giving encouragement to Israel's enemies, and losing support at home for little political advantage.

A recent Pew Research Centre survey, for example, showed how different are US perspectives to those of Europe and the Middle East. Americans placed "finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict" at the bottom of a 12-issue list of foreign policy concerns, the poll found. And foreign policy is in any case of scant consequence to a large majority of US voters primarily worried about the economy, jobs and savings.

On the campaign trail, Obama (like Clinton) was broadly supportive of Israel and specifically condemnatory of Hamas. But at the same time, he held out the prospect of radical change in western relations with Muslims everywhere, promising to make a definitive policy speech in a "major Islamic forum" within 100 days of taking office.
"I will make clear that we are not at war with Islam, that we will stand with those who are willing to stand up for their future, and that we need their effort to defeat the prophets of hate and violence," he said.
As the Gaza casualty headcount goes up and Obama keeps his head down, those sentiments are beginning to sound a little hollow. The danger is that when he finally peers over the parapet on January 21, the battle of perceptions may already be half-lost.:agree::tup:
 
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Explaining Israel's Mysterious Imperial Agenda

When Harry Belafonte declared that US President George W. Bush was “the world’s greatest terrorist”, it was clear that while he had not studied the subject sufficiently, since that notorious distinction belongs to Israel and not to Bush, he certainly showed greater understanding of the subject and more courage than most politicians and leaders today.

But Israel has another unique distinction that continuously escapes the attention of scribes, scholars and politicians. It is the only state in the world that has continuously waged unjust war with disdain for ‘gentile’ opinion, and even escalate its warfare while rendering the rest of the world powerless to do anything tangible to prevent it.

The rest of the world, that is, except Islam!

Israel’s deliberately barbarous and disproportionate military response to the Sunni Islamic resistance’s capture of one enemy soldier in the Gaza Strip, and the further capture of two more enemy soldiers by the Shia Islamic resistance in Southern Lebanon, not only constitutes yet another Israeli war crime but also sets up Israel once again for eventual retributive punishment that would be commensurate with all those war crimes. Neither Prophets David nor Solomon (peace be upon them both) ever waged war the Israeli way, with a barbarian ethical code of warfare which permits the indiscriminate bombing-destruction of entire civilian populations, men women and children, in their homes, villages, temples, and bomb-shelters (60 just killed in a village bomb-shelter in Qana, including 37 children) as well as the destruction of civilian airports, roads, bridges, electricity power plants, water works, etc., and the displacement of almost half the population of a country as refugees fleeing for their lives.
One can only wonder why the Israelite Jews who lived in peace with Muslims in the Muslim world for more than a thousand years prior to the birth of the Euro-Jewish State of Israel, have not as yet asked themselves whether Israel’s Euro-Jewish rulers are really Jews, or whether they are Euro-barbarians who disguise themselves as Jews.

BINT JABEEL, BIN JABEEL, AND ISRAEL’S FINAL RETRIBUTION
The world must now know that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) has prophesied Israel’s final and just retribution at the hands of a Muslim army. Israel has already had a taste of that coming retribution. In an essay published in the ‘Daily Express’, columnist Raffique Shah, himself trained in military strategy, described what happened when Israel attempted a ground assault on the Southern Lebanese village of Bint Jabeel:

“Having pounded the enemy for days, they thought they would have encountered only rubble. Instead, they ran into ambush after ambush, mounted by men seasoned in desert warfare. Within hours, 11 Israeli soldiers lay dead with scores more seriously wounded. The wounded were crying in agony as the Hezbullah fighters poured more fire on them. It took the Israelis several hours to extricate their troops, and that only by using their finest tanks as ambulances. Reporters on the Israeli side of the border wrote of weeping commanders and soldiers, dazed by a taste of real battle, wandering back to safety like a bedraggled, defeated army.”

Bint Jabeel, in Arabic, means Jabeel’s ‘daughter’, while Bin or Ibn Jabeel would be his ‘son’. Israel must now pause and ponder. If Bint Jabeel could fight like that, how will Bin Jabeel fight?

Israel’s final retribution, as prophesied by Prophet Muhammad in words that are engraved in the hearts of millions of Muslims around the world, would come to pass only after Jesus returns. The Prophet declared:
“You would fight the Jews and you would (succeed in) killing them (to such an extent that even) a stone would speak (and would say): Oh Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me so come and kill him!”
(Bukhari, Muslim)

That prophecy suffices today to distinguish the true Muslim from the pseudo Muslim. The true Muslim is unafraid to declare that the Jihad (just war) to liberate the Holy Land from Israeli oppression has already begun. Pseudo Muslims, from captain to cook, hurry to distance themselves from any armed struggle while insisting that Jihad is an exclusive ‘inner’ moral and spiritual struggle and has nothing at all to do with that just armed struggle.

The enemies of Islam can bite their finger-tips in frustration and with rage as they criticize and condemn those powerful words of the Prophet as ‘incitement to terrorism’. Misguided Muslim apologists can exhaust the ink in their pens as they furiously deny that Prophet Muhammad ever made such a prophecy. They can even try to sugarcoat those words with a ‘progressive interpretation’. Israel can go on to attack Iran and to madly destroy even more of the Arab/Muslim world after destroying Gaza and Lebanon. Yet none can avert the eventual fulfillment of the Prophet’s prophecy that Islam’s armed resistance to Israeli oppression would eventually be successful. On that day of success when even the stones would speak, Islam would have triumphed over all her rivals!

But while the final success of that armed resistance and retributive punishment on Israel would have to wait until Jesus (peace be upon him) returns, it is quite likely that Israel’s present political and military leadership would take the world to the brink of utter destruction if and when Israel launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran. (See essay entitled “Will Israel attack Iran?”) Such a nuclear attack on Iran would be designed to provoke that country, in the unlikely event that Iran already possesses nuclear weapons, to retaliate in kind. If Iran does not do so, Israel would still press on to destroy all Iranian nuclear power plants and other related infrastructures that could possibly be used for the development of an indigenous Iranian nuclear deterrent.

If Iran does possess nuclear weapons purchased from others, and chooses to retaliate with them, such a preemptive Israeli nuclear attack could eventually result in the death of hundreds of thousands of both

Israelis and Iranians, and that would land us all in the pit of blazing fire! If it turns out that Iran did not possess nuclear weapons, then Iranian gentile deaths do not really count as deaths with God’s so-called ‘chosen people’.

An Israeli nuclear attack on Iran could ignite such disastrous economic and monetary crises around the world that the present Pax Americana world-order could collapse and be replaced by another world-order dominated by Israel.

I believe that Israel no longer has any use for a United Nations Organization that has already been successfully used to protect the Jewish State through infancy and childhood to her present superpower status. The UN would be a cumbersome hindrance for the universal messianic dictatorship that would be Pax Judaica. Perhaps the deliberate and contemptuous murder of four UN Observer personnel that resulted from the recent Israeli bombing of the UN Observer Post in Southern Lebanon was meant to deliver to the world a message that the UN’s days are now numbered.

Islam the religion is the only significant force in the world today offering armed resistance to oppression in and around what should properly be known as the Holy Land. Islam now occupies center-stage in international affairs and the central importance of the religion can only increase as Israel relentlessly pursues the realization of her messianic destiny with an abandon that defies both morality and common sense. Islam alone is both accurately explaining the strange world today, and is correctly anticipating tomorrow’s even more horrendously evil world.

And yet, while others have privileged access to the media to articulate their viewpoint in a country which declares, “here every creed and race finds an equal place”, there is no column on Islam in any daily newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago. This Muslim scribe, who is a senior Islamic scholar and writer in the country, is forced to solicit donations with which to buy expensive newspaper space in order to explain the Islamic viewpoint on such crucially important subjects as addressed in this essay. He also has to correct misinformation and lies about Islam from the malicious pens of an ever-increasing number of crusading scribes who, with a straight face, would attempt to convince readers to accept a ‘kiskedee’ (a favorite local bird) to be a ‘corbeaux’ (a vulture). One of them just explained to us, again with a straight face, that when Prophet Muhammad declared “a people who choose a woman to rule over them would never be successful”, what he really meant (in her progressive interpretation) was that it was permissible for Muslims to choose a woman to rule over them!

This writer also has to constantly defend against devilish attempts at character assassination that maliciously seek to portray him as a “terrorist” and “a great security risk”. And if that was not enough, he also has to prepare himself for the new so-called ‘democratic’ dispensation now underway (i.e. the tribal dictatorship and police state that this country’s ruling tribe is pursuing with pig-headed determination) when freedom to buy even newspaper space would also be denied to Islam.


THREE STAGES OF A MASTER-PLAN
This essay suggests the existence of three basic stages in a mysteriously unfolding master-plan through which Israel seeks to realize her messianic destiny. The master-plan is culminating at this time when the so-called ‘chosen people’ have been mysteriously brought back from 2000 years of exile to reclaim the Holy Land as their own. Their ultimate destiny, they believe, is to rule the world from what would appear to be a restored Biblical Holy State of Israel located in the Holy Land. (The word rule is continuously italicized because of the pivotal place it occupies in the mission of the Anti-Christ.) That ultimate destiny appears soon to be realized, and so it is time enough for our readers to try to understand the subject from the perspective of Islam. In explaining those three stages of the master-plan we can, in fact, also explain much of the history of international politics and economics over the last few centuries.

In the first stage, which lasted for a long time, a Pax Britanica world-order waged strange colonial wars on the rest of the world and eventually and cleverly succeeded in ‘liberating’ the Holy Land from benevolent Muslim rule, and in presiding over the birth of the imposter Euro-Jewish State of Israel. Along the way the world witnessed the strange and otherwise inexplicable event of a secular Britain pledging, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the secular British Government’s commitment to deliver a national homeland in the Holy Land to the Jewish people. Our thesis offers to readers an explanation for that mysterious British obsession with the Holy Land.

We must also carefully note that in the effort to establish itself as the ruling State in the world, Britain had to take the initial steps towards control of the world’s money. (See the writer’s seminar on ‘Islam and Money’ available on his website Islamic Scholar Imran N Hosein) And so the British sterling pound became the international currency, and Britain became the money-lender par excellence of the world. This was a unique event in monetary history.

Then in the second stage of that master-plan – a stage which is still in progress and which will last for a shorter time than the first - a Pax Americana world-order replaced Pax Britanica and has proceeded to mysteriously protect the arrogant, aggressive and expansionist Euro-Jewish State with countless UN Security Council’s vetoes. That world-order has also been waging wars on Israel’s behalf in order to make the world safe for Israel to grow into a nuclear-armed superpower. Instead of the spectacular colonial wars which delivered to Britain the status of a ruling state, it took two world wars to bring about the transfer of power from the first to the second ruling state.

Our thesis offers to readers an explanation for that equally mysterious American obsession with the Holy Land.

There was, in addition, a monetary component to the process of emergence of USA as the second ruling state since the US dollar replaced the Sterling pound as the international currency, and USA became the money-lender par excellence of the world.

The history of these two ruling states, Britain and USA, suggests that whoever achieves control over the world’s money, can also control the world. Control over money can be used to prevent the circulation of wealth through the economy, thus ensuring that the rich remained permanently rich and the poor, permanently poverty. Control over money could also be used to buy the allegiance of the rich who would grow constantly richer, and who would join the oppressor and assist him in controlling the world. It would also reduce the poor to such impotence that they become helpless to resist oppression. That is precisely the state of the world today and it constitutes a critically important goal of the master-plan.

And then in the third, final and briefest stage of the master-plan, a Pax Judaica world-order is about to replace Pax Americana. The passage from the second to the third and final ruling state in the master-plan is again taking place through a series of strange wars. Israel would soon replace USA as the ruling state in the world and when that occurs, a Jew would eventually rule the world from Jerusalem and claim to be the true Messiah! But he would not be Jesus the true Messiah. Rather, Prophet Muhammad explained that he would be Dajjal the false Messiah (Anti-Christ).

We are now very close indeed to the culmination of that devilish master-plan that has been ominously unfolding ever since the small island Britain startled the world a few centuries ago by becoming the first ruling state in post-Biblical history (i.e., since David and Solomon created the world’s first ruling state).

TERRORISM AND THE MASTER-PLAN
The passage from the first to the second stage of the master-plan was initiated through an act of carefully planned terrorism, i.e., the assassination of the Grand Duke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914. Those who planned the assassination (was Trotsky part of the plot?) also planted false footprints at the crime-scene that led to Russia. It paved the way for the First World War which, in turn, was successfully used to dismember the Ottoman Islamic Empire and to ‘liberate’ (i.e., from the Jewish perspective) the Holy Land.

The passage from the second to the third stage of the master-plan was also initiated through an act of less-carefully planned terrorism, i.e., the 9/11 terrorist attack on America. This time around the false footprints that were planted at the crime-scene led to Arabs and Muslims, and that created opportunities for an arrogant and power-drunk USA and its Euro-allies to wage a series of wars (still in progress) to eventually impose total control over the world’s major oil resources that were not already controlled - hence American war on Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israeli wars on Lebanon, Gaza Strip, and eventually Syria and Iran. War on Venezuela as well seems inevitable, and that, perhaps, explains the haste with which the ruling tribe in Trinidad and Tobago is seeking to establish its tribal dictatorship.

Today’s wars also allow USA/Israel to eventually control the new electronic money-system of the world that would soon replace paper money when the US dollar collapses. Anti-terrorism legislation and war on terrorism (which is a euphemism for war on Islam) would eventually pave the way, in the name of international security, for the imposition of a new international monetary system of electronic money. That monetary system would make the world even safer for Israel since anyone who dared to oppose Israel could be targeted as a terrorist and could have his wealth electronically short-circuited.

The most important point this essay makes is the world is now located at that moment in time when stage two of the master-plan is culminating and stage three is commencing.

PROPHET MUHAMMAD, THE MASTER PLAN AND 666
I believe that Prophet Muhammad prophesied these three stages of the master-plan (i.e., the ultimate world-system) through which Dajjal the false Messiah (Anti-Christ) would eventually accomplish his mission of impersonating the true Messiah and thus of ruling the world from an imposter State of Israel in the Holy Land. The Prophet said:
“… when Dajjal is released he would live on earth for forty days — a day like a year — a day like a month — a day like a week — and all his days (i.e., all the rest of his days) like your days.”
(Sahih Muslim)

He also prophesied, in what has come to be known as the Hadith of Tamim Dari, that Dajjal’s initial base, i.e., in the first stage of his mission that would last for ‘a day like a year’, would be an island which specialized in spying, and was located about one month’s journey by sea from Arabia. I believe that island could not have been other than Britain!

The Bible described the very same three-stage process that would culminate with a new international monetary system of electronic money and with the Anti-Christ ruling the world from Jerusalem. It did so when it declared:
“…and he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark on their right hand, or on their forehead, and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred — three score — and six.”
(Revelation: 13:16-18)

When the Bible’s religious symbolism is analysed it clearly reveals that the number ‘six hundred’ in relation to the Anti-Christ refers to the first stage of the master plan that lasted for a long time and witnessed the emergence of the first ruling state in post-Biblical history and to Pax Britanica. The number ‘three score’ refers to the present second stage that lasts for a shorter period of time and witnesses the emergence of the second ruling state and to Pax Americana. Finally the number ‘six’ refers to the third and last stage of the master plan with which the Anti-Christ finally completes his mission and emerges in human form to rule the world from Jerusalem and from an imposter ruling State of Israel with Pax Judaica.

The most distinctive features of that unfolding master-plan from its very beginning, with the Euro-Christian crusades, to this day, have been its godlessness, decadence, deception and barbaric oppression. Only those who are deaf, dumb and blind would recognize the above as evidence of divine grace.

We now look at differing responses to oppression.

RESPONDING TO OPPRESSION
Muslims who live in the modern age have long been inspired by the prince of believers, Malcolm X, who once addressed the subject and explained the differing responses to oppression endured by slaves. The ‘house slave’ was subject to the same oppression as the ‘field slave’. Both were without ‘external’ freedom and hence in ‘external’ slavery. But while the ‘field slave’ hated that oppression and slavery, the ‘house slave’ submitted to it, identified with the slave master, and accepted his slavery. He was so brainwashed and ‘internally’ blind that he became an appendage of the slave master. He was always there to serve the slave master, however required, and whenever the slave master needed him. When the slave master was ill, the ‘house slave’ would feel his master’s pain and suffering and would declare to his master: “we sick!” The ‘house slave’ was both ‘internally’ as well as ’externally’ a slave. He became a part of the system of slavery (the ‘internally’ blind always end up as slaves). The slave master rewarded the ‘house slave’ for his faithful service by ‘buttering’ his bread. He still does that today with a US visa, or with jobs and protection in exchange for political support for the ruling tribe!

Around the world today ‘house slaves’ have hoisted themselves up to become leaders of Muslim communities.

The ‘field slave’ on the other hand was ‘externally’ a slave but ‘internally’ a free man. Because of that ‘internal’ freedom, the ‘field slave’ had the capacity to ‘see’ and to thus recognize the slave master’s oppression and wickedness, and he hated it with all his heart and soul. The ‘field slave’ never submitted to oppression and wickedness but, rather, longed to regain his freedom and to dismantle

the system of slavery. And so the ‘field slave’ responded to oppression and slavery in a manner that was anti-systemic. The slave master who was an oppressor was his enemy with whom he would never play football or cricket. Hence he would also never host either of today’s football or cricket World Cup competitions. Instead, when the slave master’s house was on fire the ‘field slave’ prayed to God to send a strong wind which would burn down the house. The slave master despised the ‘field slave’ and made him pay a terrible price for his refusal to submit and become a willing part of the system of slavery.

Muslims who faithfully follow Prophet Muhammad are today’s ‘field slaves’! Field slaves who dare to offer armed resistance to Israel’s barbarous oppression in the Holy Land and elsewhere are today demonized as terrorists. Had Malcolm X been still alive today, it is certain that he would have been declared a “terrorist” and “a great security risk”. His entry into most Caribbean states would certainly have been banned.

The Anglo-American-Israeli alliance, which today rules the world, once demonized South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) as a terrorist organization. In fact the ANC at that time was comprised exclusively of ‘field slaves’! Today, of course, there is a house-slave/field-slave struggle within the ANC. Yesterday’s heroic field-slave freedom-fighters around the world must be turning in their graves as their children succeed them as rulers and are transformed into Massa’s house-slaves.

When US President George Bush (Jr.) was preparing to wage his own unjust war on Iraq, the ANC demonstrated courage and integrity in responding with a massive street demonstration of protest. I marched with them in Johannesburg three years ago (2003) on a bright sunny February morning when Zulu dancers stole my heart with their hauntingly beautiful tribal chants and dances, and Nelson Mandela defiantly denounced the war as an attempt to steal Iraq’s oil. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir also, did not hesitate to denounce both the war on Iraq as well as the 9/11 terrorist attack on America as events planned and executed on Israel’s behalf.

Trinidad and Tobago’s tribal government could not have been unaware of the shameful implications of Prime Minister Manning’s ill-advised recent diplomatic pilgrimage to Jerusalem in which he confirmed his government’s friendship for the Euro-Jewish State of Israel. Perhaps this extraordinary high-profile diplomatic initiative was required of him because an Israeli national was embarrassingly caught red-handed while holed-up in a forest-shack close to the town of Arouca in illegal possession of a Trinidad and Tobago immigration stamp. Had he who was so caught been a Muslim he would never have been allowed to fly out of the country with a light $2000 court fine and with narry a hint of any charge connected to terrorism. Around the world today, Massa’s native house slaves would have eagerly consented to his extradition to that curious new manifestation of Republican America’s great symbol of democracy, i.e, a torture camp in Guantanamo where American military personnel have been known to urinate on copies of the Qur’an and to even flush copies of the Holy Book down the toilet..

Apart from a few misguided so-called Muslim leaders in Trinidad and Tobago who share with this country’s ruling tribe an embarrassing friendship for the oppressor State of Israel, most local Muslims oppose the Euro-Jewish state and many would gladly join in the struggle for liberation from Israeli oppression. They are not alone in their opposition to that oppression as is evident from recent essays by David Abdullah and Raffique Shah published in local newspapers. Indeed as long ago as the 17th century the English poet, John Donne (1572-1631) recognized in verse what the ruling tribe in this country still cannot recognize:
“And when the ‘chosen people’ grew more strong, Their righteous cause became the wrong.”

As the full picture of Israel’s continuing aerial bombardment and destruction of Gaza and Lebanon continues to unfold, and as Israel continues to expand the mad war of destruction now underway, perhaps to test whether Iran has nuclear weapons, we can confidently expect more people of this country to denounce Israel for its war crimes. Politicians, however, and regretfully so, hardly ever muster the integrity and fortitude to call a spade a spade when Israel happens to be the spade!

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF THE SUBJECT
Many Christians declare that the birth of the Euro-Jewish State of Israel was an act of divine grace that fulfilled Biblical prophesy. It was also divine grace, in their view, which explained the seemingly miraculous return of the Jews to the Holy Land to reclaim it as their own some 2000 years after they were expelled therefrom by divine decree.

Such misguided people do not pause to consider that the essentially godless, decadent and oppressive Euro-world-order that ‘liberated’ the Holy Land from benevolent Muslim rule and made possible the return of the Jews to that Holy Land could not possibly have been an instrument of such divine grace since truth is incompatible with godlessness, decadence and oppression.

They believe that today’s Euro-Jewish State of Israel is destined to rule the world and that its destiny would finally be realized with crowning glory when God Himself, in the person of the true Messiah the son of the Virgin Mary, returns to rule the world from Jerusalem. They believe that end of history to be now close at hand, and when it does materialize they believe it would confirm the Christian claim to truth. In the meantime they insist that every bloody step that Israel takes to expand her control over territory and to impose her authority over the surrounding Arab/Muslim world must be supported since it fulfills corrupted imperialist Biblical prophesy (“every spot on which your foot treads shall be yours”; Deuteronomy: -11-24.). They close their eyes to Israel’s shedding of innocent blood since they believe that the evil Israeli war dance is morally and spiritually justified in the context of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

According to Christian supporters, Israel’s conduct may appear to be that of an oppressor, but there is a mysterious moral philosophy somewhere in the universe (perhaps in Hollywood) that exonerates Israel and justifies as divine punishment the oppression and wanton slaughter that she has unleashed on largely defenseless Arabs, Christians, as well as Muslims. They regard all those who oppose and resist Israel to be evil. And since the true followers of Prophet Muhammad remain the only significant force resisting the Euro-Jewish state’s oppression, they consider Muslims to be the most evil people in the world. When David Abdullah asked “Has Israel has gone mad?”, and Raffique Shah warned “Don’t cry for Israel when retribution comes”, they probably blame the ‘misguidance’ of these two scribes on the Muslim connection implicit in their names. They are convinced that Muslims must be the evil Gog and Magog tribes mentioned in their scriptures, and that Prophet Muhammad must have been the Anti-Christ.

THE JEWISH VIEW OF THE SUBJECT
If the evangelical Christian view of modern-day Israel is so difficult to digest, what are we to make of the prevalent Jewish view that believes Jesus to be a ‘bastard’ and false Messiah, and Muhammad to be a false Prophet?

Most Jews believe that the birth of modern Israel and the return of the Jews to the Holy Land herald the imminent advent of the true Messiah who would rule the world from Jerusalem and through whom truth in Judaism would be validated. Such validation of truth in Judaism, they believe, would ipso facto invalidate Christian and Muslim claims to truth, and would also confirm the Jews as the “chosen people” to whom God had granted the Holy Land unconditionally and in perpetuity.

Now the secularism of modern western civilization has led western society increasingly towards atheism and godlessness. The West also has a despicable record of oppression of non-Europeans.

People who worship the God of Abraham cannot become allies of those with a record of such atheism, godlessness and oppression. But Jewish Israel believes that it has a divine right to use whatever means may be necessary to realize its goal of ruling the world from Jerusalem since the ‘end’ justifies the ‘means’. What also appears to Israel’s critics as oppression and barbarism on Ishmaelite Muslims is, in their view, divine punishment that is justified by the Torah. How so?

Arabs and Muslims have descended from Abraham’s son, Ishmael, who was condemned in the Torah as:
“… a wild *** of a man; his hand against every man (i.e., he is a bandit), and everyone’s hand against him (i.e., all of mankind would hate him and
fight against him).”
(Genesis: -16:12)

The Torah also falsely proclaimed that the Holy Land was given to the seed of Abraham through Isaac (Ishmael being falsely excluded as legitimate seed) and that the Israelite claim to the title deed of the Holy Land remains valid regardless of whether or not they are righteous in conduct:
“Know therefore that it is not for thy righteousness that the Lord thy God giveth thee this good land to possess it; for thou art a stiff-necked people.” (Deuteronomy 9:6)

But most alarming of all is the Torah’s frontiers of the Holy Land: “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying:
“To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates . . . .”
(Genesis: -15:18)

Our readers can now understand the connection between distortions in a corrupted Torah and Israel’s ominously ever-expanding territorial frontiers.

THE QUR’AN AND THE HOLY LAND
The Qur’an makes a crucially important statement concerning certain Christians and Jews who would eventually emerge in history. It says:

“You will find (time and again) that the most hostile of all people to the believers (i.e., Muslims) would be the Jews and those who are idol-worshippers or pagans; and nearest among them in love to the believers would be those who say, ‘We are Christians’, because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant.”
(Qur’an, al-Maidah, 5:82)

It prohibits Muslim friendship or alliance with a Judeo-Christian alliance:
“Oh you who believe (in this Qur’an), do not take (such) Jews and the Christians as (your) friends and allies who themselves are friends and allies of each other. And whoever of you allies himself with them becomes, verily, one of them; behold, Allah does not guide such evildoers.”
(Qur’an, al-Maidah, 5:51)

It has corrected the falsehood about Ishmael:
“Also mention in the Book (the story of) Ishmael: He was (strictly) true to whatever he promised and he was an Apostle (and) a Prophet. He used to enjoin on his people prayer and charity and he was most acceptable in the sight of his Lord.”
(Qur’an, Maryam, 19:54-5)

It has also corrected the falsehood concerning the alleged unconditional grant of the Holy Land to the Israelite people. Rather, Allah Most High granted them the Holy Land conditional on “faith in Allah” and “righteous conduct”:
“… and We declared in (both) the Torah and the Psalms (of David) that (only) Our righteous servants shall inherit the earth or land (i.e., the Holy Land).”
(Qur’an, Prophets, 21:105)

This statement of the Qur’an is supported by some of the Psalms:
“But the meek shall inherit the earth or land (i.e., the Holy Land); and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” (Psalm, 37:11)
“The righteous shall inherit the earth or land (i.e., the Holy Land), and dwell therein forever (i.e. provided that they remain righteous).” (Psalm, 37:29)
“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth or land (i.e., the Holy Land).” (Matthew, 5:5)

The Qur’an has explained that whenever the Israelites violated the divine conditions of inheritance of the Holy Land (i.e., faith in God and righteous conduct) Allah Most High expelled them from that Land. The first expulsion took place after the death of Solomon (peace be upon him) as a consequence of their “telling lies about Allah” (i.e., rewriting the scriptures to plant falsehoods in them). They were exiled to Babylon. Upon their return to the Holy Land they again violated those divine conditions when they rebelled against Allah’s Prophets and killed several of them. They even boasted of how they had crucified Jesus. As a consequence they were again expelled from the Holy Land.

After that last expulsion took place in the wake of the rejection of the true Messiah and the attempt to crucify him, Allah Most High declared
“… if you return (i.e., to the Holy Land with your wickedness and oppression), We would return (with Our punishment).”
(Qur’an, the Israelites, 17: 8)

The Israelites have today returned to the Holy Land with more wickedness and oppression than ever before, and hence it should be quite clear to those who can recognize wickedness and oppression that Divine retributive punishment as promised in the Qur’an is also certain.

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Explaining Israel's Mysterious Imperial Agenda
 
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Depleted uranium found in Gaza victims

Medics tell Press TV they have found traces of depleted uranium in some Gaza residents wounded in Israel's ground offensive on the strip.

Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.

The report comes after Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on Saturday night, opening a ground operation after eight days of intensive attacks by Israeli air and naval forces on the impoverished region.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned on Sunday that the wide-ranging ground offensive in the Gaza Strip would be "full of surprises."

A ground offensive in the densely-populated Gaza is expected to drastically increase the death toll of the civilian population.

The latest assaults bring the number of Palestinians killed to over 488 with 2790 others wounded. The UN says that about 25 percent of the casualties were civilian deaths - including at least 34 children.

According to Israeli army officials, at least 30 of its soldiers have been wounded since the start of the ground campaign.

Amid global condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region, the UN Security Council failed to agree on a united approach to resolve the crisis.

"Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council," UN General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto said Sunday.

According to diplomatic sources, the US blocked a Security Council resolution, with US Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff arguing that an official statement that criticizes both Israel and Hamas would not be helpful.

The White House has so far declined to comment on whether an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza is a justified measure.
 
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Olmert rebuffs Sarkozy's call for Gaza ceasefire


JERUSALEM: French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged Israel on Monday to halt its war in Gaza, but was rebuffed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who rejected any truce that fails to end the Islamist group's rocket attacks on Israel.


Sarkozy met Olmert after talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Sarkozy said after meeting Abbas: ‘We, Europe want a ceasefire as soon as possible. Time is working against peace. The weapons must be silenced and there must be a temporary humanitarian truce.’

But Olmert's response was that ‘the results of the operation must be...that Hamas must not only stop firing but must no longer be able to fire. We cannot accept a compromise that will allow Hamas to fire in two months against Israeli towns,’ his office quoted the premier as saying.

The UN Security Council was to hold a ministerial meeting on Tuesday to discuss an Arab call for an immediate ceasefire and for protection of Palestinian civilians, diplomats said.

But Olmert said: ‘At this time and in view of the diplomatic developments, it will not be wise to pass a (Security Council) resolution on the issue because experience has shown that Israel cannot afford losing its freedom to act against terrorism.’

In that vein, a senior Israeli official said peace efforts were under way in the Middle East itself, led by Washington that would probably be more fruitful than any Security Council action.

‘There are currently a few regional initiatives led by the US... They are making progress... Israel believes that these regional initiatives involving several Arab countries, mainly Egypt, would be more effective than a UNSC resolution.’

Concretely, Olmert and Sarkozy agreed that the French president would continue to push for a deal involving Egypt.

The French president had harsh words for Hamas, which refused to renew the six-month ceasefire and continued to fire rockets as Israel bombarded Gaza.

Hamas accused Sarkozy of ‘total bias’ towards Israel.
 
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It is enough that Sarkozy is not putting active French forces to assisst Israel. Moreover Bush and his assistant Tony Blairre are also off office otherwise Bush would have occupied Israel also for the sake of its defence against MUSLIM TERRORISTS fighting to regain their homeland.
 
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Unconventional weapons used against Gazans

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:43:01 GMT
By Akram al-Sattari



Norwegian Doctor Mads Gilbert

Doctor Mads Gilbert is a member of a Norwegian triage medical team present in the besieged Gaza Strip. The team has exposed that Israel has used depleted uranium weapons in its war on the impoverished territory which is home to 1.5 million Palestinians.

Press TV: What can you tell about the uranium findings?

Dr. Mads Gilbert:The findings about the uranium I cannot tell you much about, but I can tell you that we have clear evidence that the Israelis are using a new type of very high explosive weapons which are called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and are made out of a tungsten alloy.

These weapons have an enormous power to explode.

The power of the explosion dissipates very quickly and the strength does not travel long, maybe 10 meters, but those humans who are hit by this explosion, this pressure wave are cut in pieces.

This was first used in Lebanon in 2006, it was used here in Gaza in 2006 and the injuries that we see in Shifa [Hospital] now, many many of them I suspect and we all suspect are the effect of DIME weapons used by the Israelis.

On the long term, these weapons will have a cancer effect on those who survive. They will develop cancer we suspect. There has been very little research on this but some research has been among other places in the United States, which show that these weapons have a high tendency to develop cancer. So they kill and those who survive risk having cancer.

Press TV: And what do you have to say about this?

Dr. Mads Gilbert:All that is happening in Gaza here now is against international law, it is against humanity and I think it is against what it means to be a decent person. You don't treat other people like this. Even if you disagree with him… maybe even if you fight with them, you don't treat civilians, children and women like this.

And I have an appeal to the Israeli doctors and nurses. They are my colleagues. We belong to the same international community, the medical community. I wish that the good doctors and nurses in Israel tell their government to stop these atrocities. We cannot continue with this. We may differ in opinions, but you cannot treat the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza in this way.

Today, they were bombing in Gaza City; we received 150 wounded and more than 50 killed.

Press TV: Only at Shifa?!

Dr. Mads Gilbert:Yes, here in Shifa. I treated a ten-year-old boy. He had his whole chest filled with fragments from the bomb. On his lap was another person's leg that had been cut off. We resuscitated him and did everything we could do to save his life but he died between our hands.

This is such a terrible experience and behind the numbers that you report all the time, there are human beings, families, women, grandmothers, children. That is in fact the reality in this situation. Those who are paying the price for the Israeli bombardments now are the common people, the Palestinian people.

Half of the population in Palestine are below 15 years and 80 percent of the people in Gaza live below the level of poverty defined by the UN. Now they don't have food, they don't have electricity. It's cold they don't have warmth and in addition to that, they are killed.

This must be stopped.

Press TV How many people did you see that are effected by this weapon?

Dr. Mads Gilbert: Almost all of the patients we have received have these sever amputations. They seem to have been affected by this kind of weapon. Of course, we have many fragment injuries and burns but those who have got their limbs cut off, constitutes quite a large proportion.

You know we have a lot to do. Palestinian doctors, nurses and paramedics do an incredibly heroic job to save their people. Doctor Eric and I are just a small drip in the ocean, but we learn from them. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to do research, we have to save lives, but this question should be researched by the international community.
 
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Israeli tank fire kills 42 at U.N. school: medics

Tue Jan 6, 2009 12:42pm EST

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli tank shells killed more than 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said, in carnage likely to boost international pressure on Israel to halt a Gaza offensive.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into information on the incident at al-Fakhora school in Jabalya refugee camp, on the fourth day of a ground assault launched after a week of air strikes failed to end Hamas rocket salvoes.

People cut down by shrapnel lay in pools of blood in the street. Witnesses said two Israeli tanks shells exploded outside the school, killing at least 42 civilians and wounding dozens -- Palestinians who had taken refuge there and residents of nearby buildings.

A senior U.N. official in Gaza said 350 people had been sheltering at the school and the United Nations regularly gave the Israeli army exact geographical coordinates of its facilities to try to keep them safe from attack.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, asked by reporters about the deaths, said she was "not familiar" with the incident.

"Unfortunately, (Hamas fighters) are hiding amongst civilians," she said, adding that Israel was trying to avoid civilian casualties.

In a separate attack earlier in the day, three Palestinians were killed in an air strike on another school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

The deaths in Gaza, home to 1.5 million people, raised to 77 the number of Palestinian civilians killed on Tuesday alone, according to medical officials.

The spike in civilian casualties could prove to be a turning point in Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," launched on December 27 with the declared aim of removing the Hamas rocket threat.

The killing of dozens of unarmed Lebanese in Israel's bombing in the village of Qana in the 2006 Lebanon war drained foreign support for its campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas. Israel said it had not known civilians were in the area.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States "would like an immediate ceasefire" but one that is "durable, sustainable and not time-limited" -- comments that stopped short of a formal demand for a truce now.

International efforts already under way to end the fighting have focused on securing a deal that would meet Israel's demand that Hamas, an Islamist group in charge of the Gaza Strip, could not rearm once hostilities end.

"If there is an end to terror, an end to the smuggling of ammunition from Sinai to Gaza, the Israeli fighting will stop," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, referring to rockets and other weaponry Hamas obtains through tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border.

In fighting on Tuesday, Israeli forces pushed into the southern town of Khan Younis and battled Hamas militants on the outskirts of the city of Gaza. Palestinian medical officials said four militants were killed.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, at least 631 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,700 wounded since Israel began its offensive.

Israeli tank fire kills 42 at U.N. school: medics | International | Reuters
 
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Israel deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza

Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor in Gaza, tells CBS/Sky News that the number of civilians injured and killed in Gaza proves that Israel is deliberately attacking the population.

 
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This is not a war but genocide, a crime against humanity! :angry:
 
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