The Middle East Thread

[serious14]

Figured we could use a thread for all things Middle East on here - seems to be a bit busy over there at the moment.  This is where things are right now:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/un-calls-for-ceasefire/2009/01/09/1231004287015.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

"AFTER days of diplomatic wrestling, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution calling for an "immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire" in the Gaza Strip that would lead to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Palestinian enclave.

The resolution came on the same day Israelis were accused of killing more than 30 Palestinians after telling them to take shelter in a house that was later shelled.

The United States had wanted a less authoritative "presidential statement" from the Security Council and abstained from Thursday night's UN vote.

Arab and Western diplomats seemed unconvinced that their handiwork would silence Israeli guns or stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel. Yet they expressed hope the resolution might jolt the warring parties onto a new course which would bring the bloodshed to an end.

Last night the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said his country would keep up its offensive and that it had never agreed for any outside influence to decide on its right to defend its citizens.

A Hamas official rejected the UN resolution as not being "in the best interest of the Palestinian people".

The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said the world must act urgently to ensure measures agreed in the resolution were enacted "in the next few days". But the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said the US wanted more time for a fully mediated truce.

"The US thought it important to see the outcomes of the Egyptian mediation efforts That is why we abstained tonight. But after a great deal of consideration we decided this resolution should indeed be allowed to go forward."

The resolution does not mention Hamas, but after the vote Dr Rice placed blame for the conflict primarily on the militant group.

The Palestinian Authority's Foreign Minister, Riyad Maliki, said: "We fear for a delay [of a ceasefire] for a few hours if not a few days. We're worried [the Israelis] will continue the attack and expand it."

Yesterday the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said witnesses had accused Israeli forces of what they called "one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations".

The UN said that "according to several testimonies, on January 4 Israeli foot soldiers evacuated approximately 110 Palestinians - half of whom were children - into a single-residence house in Zeitoun, warning them to stay indoors. Twenty-four hours later Israeli forces shelled the home repeatedly, killing approximately 30.

"Those who survived and were able walked two kilometres to Salah Ed Din road before being transported to hospital in civilian vehicles. Three children, the youngest of whom was five months old, died upon arrival at the hospital," the UN office said.

The Israeli army said it would investigate the allegations.

The UN's top human rights official has called for an independent investigation of possible war crimes in Gaza and Israel. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said the harm to civilians in Israel caused by Hamas rockets was unacceptable. But she said Israel must abide by international humanitarian law regardless of Hamas's actions.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Relief and Works Agency said they were suspending movement of their staff in the coastal enclave because of the risk posed by Israeli forces. Israeli fire had earlier killed two UN workers in a relief convoy and wounded a Red Cross driver.

Just before a three-hour pause in fighting on Thursday, the UN relief agency said an Israeli tank fired on one of its food convoys, killing a Palestinian driver and another UN employee. A UN spokesman said the agency had co-ordinated the convoy with Israel, and the vehicle was marked with UN insignia.

An Israeli military spokesman said Israel had not targeted aid workers. He accused Hamas of targeting humanitarian convoys and then blaming Israel.

Israel yesterday protested to the UN over the firing of rockets from Lebanon.

Pressing on with its offensive, Israel staged more than 50 air strikes in Gaza. Hamas fired 24 rockets into Israel.

Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse"

 

[serious14]

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=519

Writing in the New Statesman, John Pilger calls on 40 years of reporting the Middle East to describe the 'why' of Israel's bloody onslaught on the besieged people of Gaza - an attack that has little to do with Hamas or Israel's right to exist.

When the truth is replaced by silence, the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, the silence is a lie. It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russias incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, Israels right to exist. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestines right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous Plan D resulted in the murderous de-population of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as ethnic cleansing. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israels first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, What shall we do with the Arabs? Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, Expel them. The order to expel an entire population without attention to age was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the worlds most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Yaari noted how easily Israels leaders spoke of how it was possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war... we are appalled.

Every subsequent war Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Yuri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. It seems, wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system... Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government , this ideology in its most consensual and simplistic variety has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. Is it an irresponsible overstatement, asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.

In describing a holocaust-in-the making, Falk was alluding to the Nazis establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Todays holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurions Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound smart GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making aid, give Washington de facto control. It beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken on Russias war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obamas silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected, given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings Think, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obamas inauguration on 21 January, I trust someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: Gaza!

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now Operation Cast Lead, which is the unfinished Operation Justified Vengeance. The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with Bushs approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the authoritative Janes Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the green light to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israels secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of New Labour Partys enduring, cringing complicity in Palestines agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Janes, needed the trigger of a suicide bombing which would cause numerous deaths and injuries [because] the revenge factor is crucial. This would motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians. What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their trigger; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda trigger. A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered by the Israeli attack and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were cleansed. The On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israels charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Behind this sordid game is the Dagan Plan, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a solution that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagans achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israels destruction and to blame for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. We have never had it so good, said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine. In fact, Hamass real threat is its example as the Arab worlds only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as Hamass seizure of power. Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the reality of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel dEscoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a monstrosity.

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a 1948-style solution the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller cantonments and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed... Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic, she wrote on 31 December. But Im not talking about World War Two, Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What Im referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years... Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesnt get more anti-Semitic than this.  She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. I am in the midst of a genocide, wrote Corrie, which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of responsibility. Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help?  Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third Writers Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised society. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the peoples courage and resistance and their luminous humanity, as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, believing the world will not forget them.

 

[serious14]

And as always, two sides to every story:

Pro Israel - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0109/1231406001535.html

Pro Palestine/Gaza - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0106/1230936698370.html

 

[serious14]

And seeing as this is the "Middle East" thread, figured I'd include some non Israel conflict stuff - more than just Israel/Palestine to the region....... although have a look at http://goal2018.org for another example of football promoting harmony.

Very interesting reading, I highly recommend this - http://www.persiansarenotarabs.com/

 

[serious14]

Very interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_naming_dispute

http://www.iranchamber.com/geography/articles/persia_became_iran.php

When "Persia" became "Iran"
This article is a part of "Persia or Iran" by Professor Ehsan Yarshater, published in Iranian Studies, Vol. XXII, No.1, 1989.


In 1935 the Iranian government requested those countries which it had diplomatic relations with, to call Persia "Iran," which is the name of the country in Persian.

The suggestion for the change is said to have come from the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of the Nazis. At the time Germany was in the grip of racial fever and cultivated good relations with nations of "Aryan" blood. It is said that some German friends of the ambassador persuaded him that, as with the advent of Reza Shah, Persia had turned a new leaf in its history and had freed itself from the pernicious influences of Britain and Russia, whose interventions in Persian affairs had practically crippled the country under the Qajars, it was only fitting that the country be called by its own name, "Iran." This would not only signal a new beginning and bring home to the world the new era in Iranian history, but would also signify the Aryan race of its population, as "Iran" is a cognate of "Aryan" and derived from it.

The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent out a circular to all foreign embassies in Tehran, requesting that the country thenceforth be called "Iran." Diplomatic courtesy obliged, and by and by the name "Iran" began to appear in official correspondence and news items.

At first "Iran" sounded alien (for non-Iranians), and many failed to recognize its connection with Persia. Some (Westerners) thought that it was perhaps one of the new countries like Iraq and Jordan carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, or a country in Africa or Southeast Asia that had just been granted independence; and not a few confused it with Iraq, itself a recent entity.

As time passed and as a number of events, like the Allied invasion of Iran in 1941 and the nationalization of the oil industry under Prime Minster Dr Mohammad Mosaddeq, put the country in the headlines, the name "Iran" became generally accepted, and "Persia" fell into comparative disuse, though more slowly in Britain than in the United States.

 

[skilbeck]

and what investment opportunities in Yemen are their serious?

 

[serious14]

and what investment opportunities in Yemen are their serious?

http://www.iktissad.com/events/IOY/1

http://www.yemen-investments.com/

Plenty of interesting reading for you right there.

 

[marinermick]

I think this is a very good thread and stuff forums should should discuss but i ask people to be as factual as possible and link to articles and stories. Please link and source all your stories.

As people would be aware this is a very sensitive issue so keep personal opinions as non-offensive as possible and refrain from posting garbage.

The mods are watching this thread very closely.

I didn't lock the last thread but I can imagine it was locked because what is a serious issue degenerated into a discussion about HP sauce. If people want a HP sauce discussion please start their own thread on that topic.

 

[serious14]

Cheers Mick - like you said, I hope this gets used for proper discussion.

On that note, has anyone ever been to the region before??  Anyone going anytime soon??

 

[kevrenor]

The mods are watching this thread very closely.

I didn't lock the last thread but I can imagine it was locked because what is a serious issue degenerated into a discussion about HP sauce. If people want a HP sauce discussion please start their own thread on that topic.

I locked the thread early this morning as it is a very volatile political and ethnic matter (with a provocative title) that although at that stage hadn't generated any hate, it couldn't be monitored through the small hours and into this morning, so safety first.  Kevrenor, Mod.

 

[clarence]

Serious14: You are a braver man than me to bring up this subject.

I have troubles making my mind up on this whole Israel/ Palestinian issue.

Just when I'm believing one side is the bad guy, and the other the good guy/victim, they switch sides and commit an atrocity against their rival! I have to whimp out in order to save my sanity, and suggest that they are both as bad and hot headed as each other (and possibly deserve each other as neighbours).

In respect to highlighting an article by John Pilger, Serious, I'd be very careful about taking his editorial pieces as gospel.

He is a journo with a liking for war zones and misery and tends to report on the more socialist/lefty side of things. He likes to offer himself up as an expert when in fact, he may have only done some preliminary research into the matter.

I am always wary of celebrity journos, who tend to look for a cause to become an expert about, rather than research the facts, conduct interviews and put it to press. In a few cases, the journo has made a career out of a conflict - Pilger certainly did out of the SE Asian conflicts of the 1960s and 70s.

I'm sure, now he has made a comment, he'll soon be on quite a few news shows offering his 'expert' opinion on conditions there, and the comparison to other war zones and atrocities he's 'witnessed'.

Some of the things he reported on during the Vietnam War and Cambodia and Laos politics, later proved to be less than the correct view. A lot of Vietnam vets and even Cambodian refugees dislike a lot of what he made out to be the case.

By all means, his article is one to read, but I'd be looking for reports from journos who have been there for years, and lesser known too, for more substance and less opinion.

 

[RADINHO]

here's the Death count Ratio:

Palestinian Deaths:Israeli Deaths

792:9

Seriously are they even comparable and also 3300 palestinians are wounded...

 

[Redline]

here's the Death count Ratio:

Palestinian Deaths:Israeli Deaths

792:9

Seriously are they even comparable and also 3300 palestinians are wounded...

Source please.

 

[FFC Mariner]

My personal view is the religion and politics shouldnt be discussed either 1:1 or on a forum. Reasoning is simple, people of different views will never agree and I suspect the mods will end up locking this and any other similar threads.

However, the right exists to discuss it so enjoy.

 

[Kareem]

And as always, two sides to every story:

Pro Israel - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0109/1231406001535.html

Pro Palestine/Gaza - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0106/1230936698370.html

I am not Pro-Palestine
I am anti-Israel for the bloodshed they r causing against my muslim brothers + sisters.  Not to mention peeved a bit by EGypt's lack of support for their Palestinian brothers but wats new. I was with middle eastern people  last week of whom may have been Palestinian (i assume so) who were crying last week- fully grown men, that i would assume left relatives behind in palestine.

Cheers Mick - like you said, I hope this gets used for proper discussion.

On that note, has anyone ever been to the region before??  Anyone going anytime soon??

hmmm- middle east region or israel/palestine region?
I have been to Saudi Arabia + Dubai (whilst in that part of world at Egypt) and would like to visit those places again in next 2-3 years but dunno if i will

Serious14: You are a braver man than me to bring up this subject.

I have troubles making my mind up on this whole Israel/ Palestinian issue.

Just when I'm believing one side is the bad guy, and the other the good guy/victim, they switch sides and commit an atrocity against their rival! I have to whimp out in order to save my sanity, and suggest that they are both as bad and hot headed as each other (and possibly deserve each other as neighbours).

I dont think u could say the civillians deserve anything (i know it was only a suggestion but tbh it seems not suitable IMO)
As far as I am concerned I dont care much about soldiers dying- as in I am not angered by it
But the killing of civillians (innocent) cannot not be justified whether they be muslims or jewish (palestinian or israeli)

One last thing...does it strike anyone as stupid this war in the fact it is a
Organisation vs Israel (as a Govt. entity)
How unfair is it that Gaza is under attack due to an organisation that tbh doesnt represent their comunnuties

 

[Ranyen]

I am tolerant of any religion, everyone is entitled to their own thoughts & beliefs, however killing in the name of "GOD" is just wrong. If you believe in "GOD" then it should be "GODs" job to make somebody die if they "deserved" it? You can't go & blow up a bus & say, the people that actually died from the blast deserved to die, whereas the ones that actually survived didn't deserve to.

I'm quite a peaceful person, and would rather ignore somebody if they didn't share the same thoughts & beliefs with me, instead of killing them.

 

[Part_Timer]

Who wants a free stress test....?? ?? ?? why cant we all just be scientologists its the only way to peace...

 

[tuftman]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7822623.stm

The 2 things that caught me out about this article
- The reported death toll, 820 Gazans, 13 Israelis.
- The apparent use of white phosphorus gas

"Palestinian medics in the area said many of those injured were suffering from burns and gas inhalations - symptoms they said indicate exposure to white phosphorous.

The reports could not be independently confirmed. Although white phosphorous is legal in munitions, its use against civilians is banned under international law."

There is also the apparent humanitarian crisis ensuing in Gaza, with disease being the last thing that civilians need to contend with.

http://www.awesomelibrary.org/MiddleEastConflict.html

This even has an analogy involving adopting children to explain the origins of the conflict

 

[Redline]

Who wants a free stress test....?? ?? ?? why cant we all just be scientologists its the only way to peace...

None of us can afford it.

 

[loyalist]

its a small price to pay for inner peace