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UK protest against deaths in police custody

presstvmobile on October 29, 2011

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Uploaded by meteaumania on October 21, 2011

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | Comments Off on UK protest against deaths in police custody

Kiryat Arba councilman calls for killing liberated prisoner

Palestine Information Center – 27/10/2011

AL-KHALIL- Kiryat Arba councilman Bentzi Goffstein has called for the killing of a liberated Palestinian prisoner in Al-Khalil, who was recently freed in the prisoners’ exchange deal between Hamas and Israel.

Jewish settlers, from the Kiryat Arba settlement built in Al-Khalil city, recently circulated a statement in Al-Khalil in both Arabic and Hebrew calling for the murder of Hani Jaber, who was released after 18 years in jail, with a photo of him attached.

Goffstein said that Jaber would not enjoy a stable life and that he might be hit in the very near future.

He said that the safest place for Jaber is behind bars.

Jaber was jailed for killing a Jewish settler who used to pester Palestinian citizens in Al-Khalil especially children on their way to school. The settler used to beat the children, pull the hair of schoolgirls, throw garbage on civilians and insult them, and throw stones at their homes.

Palestinians repeatedly complained about his acts to the Israeli authorities but no one stopped him.

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | 3 Comments

Palestine: Even Sheep Are Not Safe from Jewish Settlers

By Juwaid al-Tamimi | Wafa | 27.10.11

The villages of al-Litwani and al-Jawaya, in the south Hebron hills, are suffering from settler attacks and even the sheep are not spared. Settlers from the illegal outposts of Ma’on, Susya, and Karmel, all built on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Yatta, made their latest attack on Thursday and killed 10 sheep.

“As always, the settlers attacked the villages under the protection of the army,” said 31-year-old Kamal Ruba’i. “They detain the citizens to give the settlers time to steal our homes and kill our sheep. And that’s not all, they drove 300 of our sheep to eat the crops we’ve been working in it the whole year.”

Ruba’i said the settlers then stole the sheep.

Ratib al-Jabour, the coordinator of the Yatta Committee Against the Wall and Settlements said many people who live in the south Hebron hills came out to help and protect their friends from the settlers, but were stopped by Israeli soldiers, who blocked the area and declared it a closed military zone.

Mohammed Mohayna, 43, said that the occupation has turned thousands of acres of Yatta land into a military training area over the past years and destroyed their income sources. Nevertheless, he says he plans to stay.

“We will keep to our land, living in it and for it,” said Mahmoud Dababseh, 46. “We will not leave until they put us on their shoulders and carry us out, no matter how hard it becomes for us.”

The president of the al-Litwani village council, Sabr al-Hraini, said the village was being targeted because settlers coveted the land, but said “the attacks will only make us stronger.”

“We are in a continued war with settlers,” said Zahran Abu Qubeita, the mayor of Yatta. “No day goes by without an attack on our children, lands and even our sheep.”

According to Yatta municipality figures, of the village’s original 95,000 dunums (a dunum is about a quarter of an acre), Israeli soldiers and settlers have taken around 30,000.

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | 8 Comments

Romney: U.S. ‘Should Not Play The Role Of Leader’ In Mid-East Peace, ‘Follow’ Israel Instead

By Ben Armbruster | Think Progress |  October 28, 2011

If Mitt Romney becomes president, there are a lot of important foreign policy decisions that he’d leave up to others. Most notably, Romney often says that whatever the generals decide, that’s the course he’ll take in Afghanistan (although he backtracked on that stance when pressed recently).

Now it seems that a President Romney will allow the Israeli government to decide American policy toward that country. The free daily newspaper Israel Hayom — a media outlet closely associated with right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — asked Romney if, as president, he would ever consider moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In his answer, Romney made some astonishing claims. First, that his policy toward Israel will be guided by Israeli leaders; second, on the Jerusalem issue, he’d do whatever Israel tells him to do; and third, he does not think the United States should take a leadership role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

ROMNEY: The actions that I will take will be actions recommended and supported by Israeli leaders. I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. But again, that’s a decision which I would look to the Israeli leadership to help guide. I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process, instead we should stand by our ally. Again, my inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel, as to where our facilities and embassies would exist.

The policy that the American Embassy reside in Tel Aviv and not Jerusalem pre-dates the current administration. In fact, as Lara Friedman notes at Americans for Peace Now, the U.S. “does not recognize the sovereignty of any party in any part of Jerusalem (East or West)” and it’s “a policy that dates back to pre-1948, and has been followed by every U.S. Administration since, regardless of the President or party in the White House.”

In 1995, Congress passed a law allowing funding for the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, but the law includes an executive waiver allowing the president to invoke national security interests to block such a move. Every U.S. president since the law passed, Clinton, Obama and Bush, has invoked that waiver.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann laid out the consequences should Romney follow through on his pledge:

Were an American President be actually so irresponsible as to move the US embassy to Jerusalem outside of the context of a comprehensive permanent status agreement, such a President would contribute nothing to legitimizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Instead he would be following Israel into abject isolation, and the United States into an weakened and marginal regional and global role.

Mitt Romney the candidate falls short of making that irresponsible undertaking, and one would hope that if elected President he would find less devastating ways of protecting the US interest and aiding Israel to arrive at a conflict-ending agreement.

But it might also come as a surprise to some that Romney not only wants Israel to dictate U.S. policy, but that he does not want the United States to lead the peace process. Out on the campaign trail, Romney regularly says Obama “has thrown Israel under the bus.” But perhaps now we know who Romney thinks should be driving it.

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Wars for Israel | 1 Comment

Hamas slams US congress moves to add freed detainees to terrorism list

Palestine Information Center – 29/10/2011

GAZA — The Hamas Movement strongly denounced some US congressmen for their call to include Palestinian ex-detainees, who were released as part of the recent swap deal with Israel, on the white house’s list of terrorism.

In a press statement to the Palestinian information center (PIC) on Saturday, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum condemned this call as explicit incitement to murder and a green light for the Israeli occupation state to commit more crimes against the Palestinian people and kill freed prisoners.

The spokesman stated that the US unjust and double-standard policies were always the reason for the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people.

He stressed that the occupied people of Palestine who struggle for freedom always pay the price for the US support for the Zionist terrorism.

The US congress supports terrorism and the murder of women, children and innocent occupied people, and rejects the democracy that has brought Hamas to power, he noted.

The Hamas spokesman appealed to human rights organizations and the world’s free people to stand by the Palestinian freedom prisoners who were released recently and to mobilize worldwide support for them.

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Wars for Israel | 1 Comment

Israeli army shoots at children and two ISM activists

Notes from Behind the Blockade | October 28, 2011

After a lovely day of drinking excessive amounts of tea with a few families in South Gaza (Faraheen and Khuza’a, to be exact), an Italian colleague, Silvia, who used to live in Khuza’a, suggested walking down the road towards the local school. It was late afternoon, about 4:30 p.m. and dozens of children played in the area. We walked past slices of a giant concrete wall placed in the middle of the road. The slivers reminded me of Israel’s Apartheid Wall in the West Bank — 25 feet of reinforced concrete. The local villagers had apparently retrieved these sections from a former settlement and placed them there so that children could play outside while being (somewhat) protected from Israeli army gunfire.

Silvia pointed to a school farther down the road. “That’s where the children go to school,” she said. The sun was beginning to set and the area was quite beautiful if one didn’t look to hard at the Israeli military towers n the distance. I took some pictures, and even asked Silvia to take a photo of me. Kids played nearby and a donkey cart passed us. I photographed a house that looked like it had been bombed, but the bougainvillea had grown back in vibrant fuchsia. Two boys playing with a piece of plastic ran towards us from farther up the road and begged me to take a photo. I snapped a sloppy photo, and they eagerly checked their digital images on my camera. One in a green sweater thought it was terribly funny that the boy’s in a red hoodie’s head was missing in my photo.

They ran up ahead, and we walked for about 15 seconds when I heard a strange whiz, a whistle, eerily close to my ear. I paused, a bullet? Red hoodie and two younger boys up ahead hit the floor as I momentarily pondered the strange sound.

The kids turned around and yelled at us two stupid foreigners to get down. We bent down and started to walk away — fast — and they yelled at us to get completely on the ground. The Israeli army left us no time to be scared. No gunshots over our heads. No warnings. A second bullet whizzed past the three kids, and then us. The Israelis were shooting at us from the towers 500 meters ahead. This time, we were on the ground. I continued to look at these 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds or whatever they were for cues–walking towards their school under Israeli fire was clearly routine for them and they knew what they were doing. We waited on the ground for several minutes. As I still had my camera in hand, I snapped a quick photo of them from the ground.

A minute or two later a father and his toddler, also further up on the road came towards us and offered a ride on the back of his motorized cart. We jumped in and he “sped” back to behind the wall. Anyway, I got back to my apartment about an hour later, just in time for my Arabic class. Even though I had actually studied this time, I couldn’t concentrate. Why was the Israeli army shooting at our heads?

And I realized this is what Palestinian first, second, third, fourth graders experience daily in Gaza.

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | Comments Off on Israeli army shoots at children and two ISM activists

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, five killed

By Alaa Ashkar | IMEMC & Agencies | October 29, 2011

Five Palestinians were killed, and five others were injured, when the Israeli Air Force bombarded, on Saturday afternoon, a training center that belongs to fighters of the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad.

The Air Force fired at least two missiles into a training center for the Al-Quds Brigades near Tal As-Sultan, south of the Gaza Strip; at least five fighters were killed in the attack.

Medics arrived at the scene and transferred the dead and the wounded to a local hospital, local sources reported.

The he Al-Quds Brigades issued a statement confirming that one of its military training centers was bombarded leading to several casualties.

The Brigades said that Ahmad Al Sheikh Khalil, one of its main leaders specialized in explosives, was killed in the attack, and added that Khalil is the brother of four fighters who were previously killed by the Israeli army.

Fighters Basem Abu Al Ata, Mohammad Ashour Shatat, Imad Bakeer and Bassel Ghannam, were also killed in the attack.

The Brigades vowed retaliation while its spokesman, Abu Ahmad, to the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center, that what happened is a serious Israeli escalation, and a crime that “cannot go unpunished”.

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Militarism, Subjugation - Torture | 2 Comments