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Azerbaboon: 9.000 Google hits and counting! -
Re: War in The Middle East
Qatar, Mauritania suspend ties with Israel
Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:56:00 GMT
Qatar and Mauritania have decided to suspend their ties with Israel following a regional summit in Doha to discuss the war on Gaza.
"Mauritania and Qatar have decided during a meeting behind closed doors to suspend their ties with Israel," a Mauritanian diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Qatar has hosted an Israeli trade bureau since 1996, while Mauritania has had diplomatic ties with the Israeli regime since 1999.
The Nouakchott government called back its ambassador to Tel Aviv after Israel refused to heed international calls to halt attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Tel Aviv launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 to put an end to rocket attacks against southern Israeli towns. At least 1,133 Palestinians have died during the offensive, while some 5,150 others have been wounded.
Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the impoverished Gaza Strip, demands a cessation of an 18-month Israeli blockade on the coastal enclave -- home to some 1.5 million Palestinians -- before its fighters suspend retaliatory rocket attacks.
The UN Security Council adopted resolution 1860 which calls for an immediate end to the ongoing crisis. Both sides, however, have rejected the resolution.
The decision by Mauritania and Qatar to suspend ties with Israel comes after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called on Arab countries at the Friday meeting to severe all 'direct and indirect ties with Israel' and close their embassies.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also called for a boycott on all Israeli goods.
Azerbaboon: 9.000 Google hits and counting!Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
Very good Mr. Erdogan!!! Palavra, you will not like this
. I'm really just counting down the days before the generals take over, again.
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Israel should be barred from UN, Erdogan says
16.01.2009 16:33 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey’s Prime Minister on Friday said Israel should be barred from the United Nations while it ignores the body’s calls to stop fighting in Gaza.
"How is such a country, which totally ignores and does not implement resolutions of the UN Security Council, allowed to enter through the gates of the UN (headquarters)?" Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
Erdogan spoke before UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Ankara to discuss the conflict. Erdogan’s comments reflected a growing anger in Turkey, Israel’s best friend in the Muslim world, over Israel’s Gaza operation. Ban is on a weeklong trip to the region to promote a truce after both sides ignored a UN resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire.
"The U.N. building in Gaza was hit while the UN secretary-general was in Israel," Erdogan said. "This is an open challenge to the world, teasing the world."
Israel infuriated the U.N. Thursday when it shelled the world body’s headquarters in Gaza City, where hundreds of Gazans were seeking cover from the fighting among food and supplies meant for refugees. The destruction added to what aid groups say is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and increased tensions between Israel and the international community even as diplomats engaged in cease-fire talks, the AP reports.
Azerbaboon: 9.000 Google hits and counting!Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
Why? who said I am pro-israel(I dislike their war style, kill 10 innocent for one terrorist.) and Generals will not take over again. Only result would be, recognition of AG at USA and I dont care about it.(As I said before, I am neutral at that issue.)Very good Mr. Erdogan!!! Palavra, you will not like this . I'm really just counting down the days before the generals take over, again.Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
I did not say you were pro-Israel. I thought you were against Turkey taking the side of the Palestinians, remember this?Originally posted by Palavra View Post
Turkey has nothing to gain support Hamas and everything to loose fight against israel. Still, We are trying our best against israel and Unlike Egypt we are trying to do something.
(I think, It is still stupid act. That is against the biggest rule of international politics. Follow your own benefit.)Azerbaboon: 9.000 Google hits and counting!Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
I just said what I believe true.
Anyway, I think that I may accept some harm to Turkish benefits for Palestinian childrens. But Still It is foolish
(So np, USA can accept AG.)
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Re: War in The Middle East
if you're muslim, you're not supposed to think like that.Originally posted by Palavra View PostI just said what I believe true.
Anyway, I think that I may accept some harm to Turkish benefits for Palestinian childrens. But Still It is foolish
and to satisfy your theory about self interest:http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_...ash=cea02c37f1
the AKP is consolidating its position by alligning itself with public opinion in this issue.Last edited by SoyElTurco; 01-17-2009, 01:43 PM.Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
Israel has no respect for international borders or human rights which was shown when it invaded Lebanon. So I think its about time that the Arab world started breaking ties with Israel because Israel is dangerous and only cares about its own interests.Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
Zionism in Gaza’s Shattered Mirror
Thursday, 15 January 2009, 9:19 am
Column: M. Shahid Alam
Zionism in Gaza’s Shattered Mirror
by M. Shahid Alam
At a time when Palestinian men, women and children, corralled in the ghetto of Gaza since 1948, are daily, hourly, relentlessly, being bombed from the air, land and sea, it is instructive to turn to some of the founding fathers of Zionism, and ask what they might have thought about this obscene consequence of their messianic vision.
In the writings of these founding fathers, the Palestinians rarely merit even a passing reference. You can pore through one of the earliest statements of the Zionist credo, Moses Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem, but you will find not a single reference to ‘Muslims’ or ‘Arabs.’ Twice, the word ‘Palestinian’ enters this venerated text; the first time, it appears in connection with the training of xxxish youth for the “life of a Palestinian farmer;’ and the second refers to the ‘Jerushalmi Palestinian Talmud Sanhedrin.’ Palestine always exists, inscribed on some divine tablet, as Israeli land; but there are no Palestinians.
If you search Theodore Herzl’s The xxxish State, you come away with the same disappointing results. It contains not a single reference to Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians: or even Bedouins. Incredibly, a search through Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, a classic anthology of excerpts from several generations of Zionist thinkers, produced identical results. The Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians never entered into their plans for a xxxish state. To use a term from Lawrence Davidson, this is ‘perceptual depopulation’ of Palestine, at its extreme.
Nearly from the outset, the Zionists exuded power. Palestine was a thing to be bought; and if it was not for sale, they would take it by force. Twice, Rabbi Kalischer urged the head of the Rothschild family and Moses Montefiore to buy Palestine – or, at least, Jerusalem – from the Ottoman Sultan. More than once, Theodore Herzl too offered to buy Palestine from the Ottoman Sultan. He was told, it was not for sale.
That would not derail Zionist plans; they could persuade one or more European powers to take it for the xxxs by force. In 1818, Mordecai Noah, an early American Zionist, proposed that the xxxs could create their own army and do it themselves. Nearly all Zionists were more pragmatic: they decided to let the Europeans do it for them.
This is how Theodore Herzl laid out his plan for creating a xxxish state. “Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves (italics added).” Hidden in that innocuous ‘the rest’ are the unmentionable people who inhabited Palestine. Two agencies would suffice to carry out this plan: The Society of xxxs and The xxxish Company.
In the plan that Herzl worked out, The Society of xxxs would “treat with the present masters of the land [the Ottomans], putting itself under the protectorate of the European powers…” Herzl adds that the “creation of our state would be beneficial to adjacent countries…;” but the people living there go unmentioned.
However, Herzl does pay careful attention to more weighty matters, such as how best to get rid of the “wild beasts” in the country they would appropriate. The methods used to colonize Palestine (or Argentina) would have to be modern, using the latest technology. “It is foolish,” he explains, “to revert to old stages of civilization, as many Zionists would like to do.”
Here is how the Zionists should work, Herzl explained, if they “were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts…” “We should not take spear and lance,” he emphasizes, “and go out singly in pursuit of bears; we should organize a large and lively hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb into their midst (italics added).”
It is most unlikely that Herzl was speaking – even subconsciously, I will grant – of the Palestinians when he explains for the benefit of xxxish colons, how to clear their colony of “wild beasts” such as “bears.”
Nevertheless, who can escape noticing the eerie parallels between the methods that he proposes to get rid of the “wild beasts” and the strategy and tactics that xxxish colonists have adopted since 1948 to clear Palestine of its indigenous population?
Already, in the 1930s, the Yishuv had created “a large and lively hunting party” called the Haganah that would grow very quickly after 1948 into one of the most formidable militaries in the world.
In 1948, this “large and lively hunting party” would launch its first massive drive to “clear” Palestine of the “wild” Palestinians. The “hunting party” has since worked to ensure that the “wild” Palestinian refugees would never return to their lands. Whenever the “wild” Palestinians have ventured out of their refugee pens to re-enter or reclaim their lands, the “hunting party” has deterred them by throwing “a melinite bomb in their midst.”
A second drive to clear out the “wild” Palestinians was launched in 1967, when a much-expanded “hunting party” captured all of Palestine.
After 1967, the Israeli “hunting party” began to implement a new plan for clearing out the West Bank and Gaza of the “wild” Palestinians. Eager to make room for new cohorts of xxxish settlers, the “hunting party” began to “drive…together” the “wild” Palestinians into ever-smaller enclaves within these newly acquired territories.
In Gaza, the Israeli plans began to run into difficulty with the start of the Second Intifada in 2000. The Islamist Hamas had been gaining strength in the heavily overcrowded and miserable pens to which the Palestinians had been confined since 1948. In preparation for a new approach to neutralizing the besieged Palestinians, Israel adopted a new approach in 2005. It removed its “hunting party,” including xxxish settlers, out of harm’s way, as it moved to seal Gaza’s borders, the better to throw “melinite bombs into their midst.”
It is the ghastly culmination of this new strategy we have been witnessing in Gaza over the past weeks.
Israel is the crowning achievement of modernity in our times, of the rational, efficient and ruthless pursuit of power for one tribe; its success depends now, as in the past, on the massive deployment of “melinite bombs” against virtually unarmed “wild beasts.”
In the words of Herzl, again, Israel seeks to complete its colonial-settler enterprise “in a bolder and more stately style than was ever adopted before, for we now possess means which men never yet possessed.”
Yet, for more than a hundred years since the launching of the Zionist project, the “wild” Palestinians have remained undefeated. For more than thirty years, they faced the “iron wall of British bayonets;” and since 1948, they have courageously stood up against the thickening “iron wall of xxxish bayonets.”
The Palestinians have one resource the Zionists do not have: they have justice on their side.
Yet, justice has not always prevailed when it has been overmatched by brute force. America's dead natives can testify to that. That is the hope that drives Israelis; they are sustained by their conviction that they “possess means which men never yet possessed.”
Perhaps, world conscience will wake up in time to convince the Zionists to the contrary. Perhaps, this can happen before it is too late, before the tide of history has turned decisively against Israel.
Israel can only be sustained if it can score repeated victories against the peoples of the Middle East – clear, quick and stunning victories, like those of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1982. That has been changing, starting with Israel's unilateral retreat from Lebanon in 2000. Then there was Israel's costly and transparent failure to attain any of its objectives with the massive onslaught against Hizbullah in 2006. Israel faces another failure against Hamas now, against a much weaker foe.
How will Israel save face after this? Will they persist in their attempt to destroy the Palestinians, with a new generation of “melinite bombs” dispatched from the United States? Alternatively, will Israeli mothers force Israeli warmongers to make a sincere determination to make amends to the Palestinians and learn to live with them in a non-racist society?
Let us hope that Israelis – at last – will make the right choice.
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M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007). Send comments to [email protected]. Visit the author’s website at http://aslama.org.Last edited by hipeter924; 01-17-2009, 01:59 PM.Comment
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Re: War in The Middle East
Israelis evicted from New Zealand cafe
By Dan Goldberg · January 16, 2009
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) – A Muslim cafe owner in New Zealand evicted two customers because they were Israeli.
Mustafa Tekinkaya, a Muslim from Turkey, heard Natalie Bennie and Tamara Shefa speaking Hebrew at his cafe in Invercargill on the South Island earlier this week and ordered them out.
“He heard us speaking Hebrew and he asked us where we were from,” Mrs Bennie told the local newspaper. “I said Israel and he said ‘get out, I am not serving you’. It was shocking.”
Tekinkaya said he was protesting Israel’s action in the Gaza Strip.
“I have decided as a protest not to serve Israelis until the war stops,” he said.
A complaint was lodged with the Human Rights Commission. New Zealand's race relations commissioner said Tekinkaya was in breach of the law.
Israel’s ambassador to New Zealand Yuval Rotem was scathing. “This anti-Israeli and anti-xxxish sentiment needs to be stopped,” he told The Southland Times.
“At this moment you don't need to bring the Middle East into New Zealand ... you need to take the spirit of New Zealand into the Middle East.” New Zealand is iconic among Israelis as being an outpost of civility.
Also this week, more than 100 pro-Israel supporters rallied on the steps of Parliament in Wellington, the capital. Holding olive branches, they held a minute’s silence for the 1,000-plus people who have been killed in the conflict.
Meanwhile, Father Gerard Burns, the Catholic priest who defaced a memorial to Yitzhak Rabin last week with paint and drops of blood, appears to have emerged unscathed from the incident. He has not apologized, and Wellington’s Catholic Church has not censured him, although Archbishop John Dew has apologized for father Burns’ actions.
Police have yet to decide whether they will lay charges.
Taken from: http://jta.org/news/article/2009/01/...w-zealand-cafeComment
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