I do what I want - You do what you're told

June 13, 2008

In Bethlehem, the Wall coils into a semi-circle around a secluded three-storey building. The only side of the home not bordered by towering concrete is lined with crumbled debris from dismantled roadblocks. A narrow street, forcefully squeezed between the Wall and the home, curls around to the entrance of the building. The front door opens to a view of the rectangular pillars that form the threatening barrier. Colorful graffiti wallpapers the drab gray slabs that are tipped with razor wire. A row of desolate rooms serve as the foundation of the building. Two small girls, sitting amidst the emptiness, smile at us behind the glass walls. This complex is the home of Claire Anastas and her family.

A woman poked her head through a window on the top floor, calling for us to come up. We ascended the raveling staircase and entered a dimly-lit flat, where our hostess warmly invited us into the living area. Claire Anastas sat next to me on the couch, her hands folded in her lap. She was a beautiful woman, slim and well-dressed, but her eyes were lit much like the room. Claire’s mother, wrapped in a robe, sat in an armchair in the corner. She was draped in the white sunlight that slipped between the half-drawn curtains. She murmured quietly to herself as she watched a muted religious television program, gently twirling a cross fastened to a chain of worry-beads in her weathered hands.

"There is no need to tell all the bad stories," Claire responded as we explained to her our purpose for being there, which was to listen. "But it is important to hear."

Fourteen members of her family live in the building, including Claire’s husband and four children, her mother, and her brother’s family. Nine of the fourteen people are children.

"No one else lives in the building anymore except us," Claire said. "There used to be others, but they left because of the problems."

The towering barrier serves as a constant reminder of the family’s difficult circumstances.

Photo: Palestine Monitor

The Anastas family once ran three successful souvenir shops, located on the first floor of the apartment building.

"This was one of the main streets in Bethlehem before the Wall," Claire said, motioning in the direction of the road. "It was one of the busiest streets for business."

"But now . . ." she added with a weary shrug.

Business slowed considerably in 2000 when the Second Intifada started. Then, construction began on the Wall in 2002, combined with a curfew that lasted over a year. The family slept near the front door during this intense period, out of fear of the snipers that fired through their windows. The main road was closed with roadblocks and then completely severed when that portion of the Wall was completed. Claire said they were then forced to close their shops, now the desolate rooms opening to the street. No one comes down a broken street that runs into a solid wall.

One winter, the ice melted and rushed down the slight incline on which the house sits. Before, the water would continue down the hill, but the Wall now blocks the way. Only one drain was installed and it plugged up, causing the water to flood the artificial bowl created by the Wall. The flood crept up and damaged the Anastas’ shops, costing them a lot of money in repairs. They have received no compensation for their losses due to the Wall.

The roof of the family’s home is slightly higher than the peak of the Wall. Because of this, Israeli soldiers decided to transform the roof into a military outpost for several months. Claire said they had to obtain a permit in order to hang laundry on their own roof.

The worst part of the situation has been the psychological impact on the nine children. The family does not want to leave, Claire said, but they have considered the option for the children’s wellbeing.

"Maybe the situation has cooled in some places," Claire said, "but not here. We are still surrounded."

We thanked Claire for her hospitality and for her time. She thanked us for listening.

"No one should bear all this," she said as she opened the door, "but we have borne it all. Our only hope is in God."

Down on the street, I looked up again at the lonely house trapped in a cage. We then turned and left the house with seven Walls.

The Anastas’ once-busy shops, which led to a major street, now open directly to graffiti on the Wall.

Photo: Palestine Monitor

The three shops on the bottom floor are now closed because traffic no longer journeys down their broken road.

Photo: Palestine Monitor

Anti-siege committee: Israel's decision of not allowing in foodstuff war crime

Palestinian Information Center

Without deviation from the norm,

‘progress’ is not possible.

Frank Zappa

'Special Weapons' Have a Fallout on Babies

Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail*

Note: I've edited this article because of the really hard photos and videos that were in the original version and that I know, aren't that pleasent to be seen. If you want to see with your own eyes what happens to Fallujah babies go there:

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42762

Asherah

FALLUJAH, Jun 12 (IPS) - Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

Many doctors believe DU to be the cause of a severe increase in the incidence of cancer in Iraq, as well as among U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War and through the current occupation.

"We saw all the colours of the rainbow coming out of the exploding American shells and missiles," Ali Sarhan, a 50-year-old teacher who lived through the two U.S. sieges of 2004 told IPS. "I saw bodies that turned into bones and coal right after they were exposed to bombs that we learned later to be phosphorus.

"The most worrying is that many of our women have suffered loss of their babies, and some had babies born with deformations."

"I had two children who had brain damage from birth," 28-year-old Hayfa' Shukur told IPS. "My husband has been detained by the Americans since November 2004 and so I had to take the children around by myself to hospitals and private clinics. They died. I spent all our savings and borrowed a considerable amount of money."

Shukur said doctors told her that it was use of the restricted weapons that caused her children's brain damage and subsequent deaths, "but none of them had the courage to give me a written report."

"Many babies were born with major congenital malformations," a paediatric doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "These infants include many with heart defects, cleft lip or palate, Down's syndrome, and limb defects."

The doctor added, "I can say all kinds of problems related to toxic pollution took place in Fallujah after the November 2004 massacre."

Many doctors speak of similar cases and a similar pattern. The indications remain anecdotal, in the absence of either a study, or any available official records.

The Fallujah General Hospital administration was unwilling to give any statistics on deformed babies, but one doctor volunteered to speak on condition of anonymity -- for fear of reprisals if seen to be critical of the administration.

"Maternal exposure to toxins and radioactive material can lead to miscarriage and frequent abortions, still birth, and congenital malformation," the doctor told IPS. There have been many such cases, and the government "did not move to contain the damage, or present any assistance to the hospital whatsoever.

"These cases need intensive international efforts that provide the highest and most recent technologies that we will not have here in a hundred years," he added.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed concern Mar. 31 about the lack of medical supplies in hospitals in Baghdad and Basra.

"Hospitals have used up stocks of vital medical items, and require further supplies to cope with the influx of wounded patients. Access to water remains a matter of concern in certain areas," the ICRC said in a statement.

A senior Iraqi health ministry official was quoted as saying Feb. 26 that the health sector is under "great pressure", with scores of doctors killed, an exodus of medical personnel, poor medical infrastructure, and shortage of medicines.

"We are experiencing a big shortage of everything," said the official, "We don't have enough specialist doctors and medicines, and most of the medical equipment is outdated.

"We used to get many spinal and head injures, but were unable to do anything as we didn't have enough specialists and medicines," he added. "Intravenous fluid, which is a simple thing, is not available all the time." He said no new hospitals had been built since 1986.

Iraqi Health Minister Salih al-Hassnawi highlighted the shortage of medicines at a press conference in Arbil in the Kurdistan region in the north Feb. 22. "The Iraqi Health Ministry is suffering from an acute shortage of medicines...We have decided to import medicines immediately to meet the needs."

He said the 2008 health budget meant that total expenditure on medicines, medical equipment and ambulances would amount to an average of 22 dollars per citizen.

But this is too late for the unknown number of babies and their families who bore the consequences of the earlier devastation. And it is too little to cover the special needs of babies who survived with deformations.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East). (END/2008)

Israel’s nuclear bombs are the problem in the Middle East

Posted: 07 Jun 2008 08:07 AM CDT

Once again, Israel is pushing the Middle East to the brink of war, with predictably disastrous consequences. In recent days, Israeli leaders markedly escalated their war of words against Iran. A leading Israeli cabinet minister was quoted on Friday, 6 June as saying, “attacking Iran will be unavoidable.”

Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, just back from a meeting with George W. Bush in Washington, sounded almost euphoric when he spoke of an “American-Israeli consensus on the need to stop Iran’s nuclear program by whatever means necessary.”

Needless to say, an Israeli or American-Israeli attack on Iran would be a blatant and unprovoked aggression on a sovereign nation.  It would also plunge the world into an unpredictable phase of violence and turbulence, with deep and far-reaching ramifications.

Iran, although hostile to Israel because of the latter’s Nazi-like occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people, has never attacked Israel.

True, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often makes stupid and irresponsible rhetorical remarks about wiping Israel off the map, thus giving the Zionist regime ample hasbara ammunition to incite and blackmail the West into boycotting and isolating the Iranian republic. However, Ahmadinejad himself and other Iranian officials have made it abundantly clear that Iran is not against Jews or Judaism, but rather against Zionism, an inherently racist and manifestly criminal ideology based on mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

This seems a plausible explanation because if Ahmadinejad were truly hostile to Jews or Judaism, let alone if he harbored genocidal designs against the Jewish people, as the Zionist propaganda machine keeps telling us, he would start with tens of thousands of Iranian Jewish citizens who enjoy religious and civil freedoms and are represented in the Iranian parliament.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister said  “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” This is exactly the maxim being adopted by Zionist leaders who are spreading lies, disinformation and half-truths about Iran in order to get the madman in Washington D.C. and his gang of neocons and war criminals to attack another Muslim country on Israel’s behalf.

Unlike most Arab states in the region, Iran is a dignified country that respects itself and values its independence.  It adamantly refuses to be at America’s beck and call and rejects the western rationale that the Nazi holocaust against Jews during WWII justifies the dispossession and destruction of the Palestinian people at the hands of Zionist Jews.

Iran, despite all the disinformation to the contrary, is not really against peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. However, Iran, mainly because of moral considerations, can’t accept the perpetuation of Palestinian suffering and dispossession through the creation of a deformed and truncated Palestinian “state” on less than 20% of the Palestinian homeland while allowing the apartheid Israeli regime to keep the rest of the spoils of theft. In other words, Iran says that ethnic cleansing must never be allowed to triumph.

Well, isn’t that compatible with the views of most men and women of honesty and conscience all over the globe?

Nonetheless, the main Israeli motive behind its hostility to Iran stems from Israeli worries that a technologically advanced and militarily strong Iran might pose a credible challenge to Israel’s strategic supremacy in the region.

Israel is believed to possess hundreds of nuclear warheads, ready with delivery systems, in addition to a huge arsenal of state-of-the-art of American weapons of death. Israel also tightly controls American politics, policies, political parties and media, especially the so-called agenda-setters.

Indeed, one exaggerates very little by saying that the United States of America is subservient to Israel and that American politicians, including members of Congress and the Senate as well as presidential candidates are more answerable to the Jewish lobby, especially AIPAC, than they are to their own American constituents.

The recent speech by the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama during AIPAC’s convention last week is very telling. It proves once again that the international Zionist cartel, of which AIPAC constitutes the American chapter, tightly controls the American political discourse and that any American politician who dares speak his or her mind about Israel’s slow-motion genocide of Palestinians or more recently about America’s relations with the Muslim world, will be committing political suicide.

So, how can an essentially third world country like Iran possibly pose a real threat to nuclear Israel that is backed by the only superpower in the world, its guardian-ally, the United States?

Besides, Iran has a natural right to harness nuclear technology, even for military purposes. Indeed, if Israel had the right to possess and stockpile hundreds of nuclear warheads, that are being trained at Muslim cities such as Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran and Damascus and probably Mecca and Medina as well, why on earth would Muslim states such as Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia not have such a right?

After all, are Jewish nuclear bombs kosher? Are they altruistic? Are they innocuous?

I am not and will never be a fan of nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction. And I think the invention of these ugly tools of mass extinction represented the lowest point in human morality if only because these weapons are capable of annihilating the human race.

Having said that, however, I believe that a situation where certain states are allowed to possess the nuclear technology (and nuclear weapons) while others are not, is inherently unjust and unacceptable.

This situation allows criminal states like Israel to coerce and bully other states and other peoples and even blackmail the entire world. It allows Israel to bomb Tunis, Baghdad, Syria and threaten to bomb the Egyptian Aswan Dam and then tell the helpless victims “hit me back if you dare.”

Hence, Israel must bring itself to understand that this situation where Israel keeps bullying hundreds of millions of Muslims by brandishing her nuclear bombs in their faces and telling them “hit me back if you dare” is intolerable and unacceptable, to say the least.

Muslims around the world are watching helplessly the despicable treatment Israel is meting out to the Palestinians.  And in their hearts and minds they realize that if they don’t acquire military strength, or at least enough of it to deter Israel’s genocidal whims, their turn will eventually come because Israel’s ambitions go far beyond Gaza and the West Bank.

Don’t tell me I am exaggerating. A state that dropped 3 million cluster bomblets on Lebanon two years ago is capable of carrying out the unthinkable, especially in light of the fact that the main capitals of Europe and North America are more or less Israeli-occupied territories.

This is a message that not only Iran ought to understand and internalize. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and even Turkey must also get busy.

In a jungle where strength respects strength, one has to be a tiger, a fox or a venomous cunning snake in order to survive.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. 

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.  Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.  Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. 

Bertrand Russell, mathematician and humanist

This pic is an art by Viona. Don’t steal, don’t repost. Ask for permission here:

http://viona-art.com/