Understanding Gaza

By GABRIEL KOLKO

How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza? Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 elections? A test range for new American weapons? Or an effort to lock in the new Obama Administration into an anti-Iranian position? An attempt to establish its military “credibility” after its disastrous defeat in the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006? Perhaps all of these…and more.
But one thing is certain. Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians for each of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that has produced horror in much of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of people—possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nation—save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it has enflamed the entire Muslim world
As Bruce Riedel, a “hawk” who has held senior posts in the CIA for nearly 30 years and is now one of President Obama’s many advisers, has just written: “…the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al Quaeda,” and “Muslims feel a profound sense of wrong about the creation of Israel that infuses every aspect thinking and activities and has become the rallying cry used the convince the ummah of the righteousness of al Quaeda’s cause.” That was before Gaza. Much of the world now detests Israel but most it will live for many years to come with the consequences of Israel’s atrocities. Muslim extremists will now become much stronger.
Charges of war crimes are now being leveled—and justifiably so—at the Israelis, many of whom themselves come from families that suffered in the hands of the Nazis over 60 years ago and now claim that the Holocaust was the only tragedy—as if the far more numerous deaths of goyim throughout the world after 1945 count for nothing. The United Nations and human rights groups are demanding that Israel be brought to justice for what now amounts to having killed over 1300 Gazans with immense firepower, many of which, like phosphorous bombs, are illegal. Israel has already prepared its senior officers to be ready to defend themselves against war crimes charges and Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz several weeks ago warned the government was expecting a “wave of international lawsuits.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko01212009.html

by Ariane Sherine

http://www.justgiving.com/atheistbus

Islam on Chicago Transit Authority buses

http://www.gainpeace.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56:cta-bus-ad-campaign-press-release&catid=13:press-release&Itemid=21

by Marlene Zuke

Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.

Lou Beach
Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. A recent cartoon shows one of those evolutionary progressions — ape to man walking upright to man slouched over a computer — with the caption “Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/health/views/20essa.html?_r=1&ref=science

by Taslima Nasrin

1
My mother’s eyes became yellowish, egg-yoke like.
Her belly swelled out rapidly like an overly full water tank
ready to burst at any moment.
No longer able to stand up, or sit down, or even move her fingers, she just lay there.
At the end of her days, she did not look like Mother any more.

Relatives appeared each morning, every evening,
telling Mother to be prepared,
telling her to be ready to die on the holy day, Friday,
uttering la ilaha illallah, Allah Is One!

They warned her not to disappoint the two angels—
Munkar and Nakir.

The relatives wanted to make certain that the room
and yard would be clean
that the perfume shurma and the blue eye shadow atar
would be present when Death would finally arrive.

The disease had nearly devoured her entire body;
it had stolen her last remaining strength;
it had made her eyes bulge from their sockets,
it had dried her tongue,
it had sucked the air from her lungs.

As she struggled to breathe,
her forehead and eyebrows wretched with pain.
The whole house demanded— shouting—
that she should send her greatest respects and reverence
to the Prophet.
Not one doubted that she would go to Jannatul Ferdous,
the highest level of heaven.

Not one doubted that she would soon walk hand-in-hand
with Muhammed, on a lovely afternoon,
in the Garden of Paradise…
No one doubted that the two would lunch together
on pheasant and wine.

Mother thus dreamed her lifelong dream:
She would walk with Muhammed
in the Garden of Paradise.

But now, at the very time that she was about to depart from this Earth, what a surprise!

She hesitated.

Instead of stepping outside, and entering that Garden,
she wished to stay and boil Birui rice for me.
She wished to cook fish curry and to fry a whole hilsa.
She wished to make me a spicy sauce with red potatoes.

She wished to pick a young coconut for me
from the south corner of her garden.
She wished to fan me with a silken hand-fan,
and to remove a few straggly hairs from my forehead.

She wished to put a new bed sheet upon my bed,
and to sew a frock with colorful embroidery—
just for me.

Yes, she wished to walk barefoot in the courtyard,
and to prop up a young guava plant with a bamboo stick.

She wished to sing sitting in the garden of hasnuhena,

“Never before, had such a bright moon shone down,
never before, was night so beautiful.. .”

My mother wanted so desperately to live.

2
There is, I know, no reincarnation,
no last judgment day:

Heaven, pheasant, wine, pink virgins —
these are nothing but traps
set by true believers.

There is no heaven for mother to go.
She will not walk in any garden with anybody whatsoever.

Cunning foxes will instead enter her grave;
they will eat her flesh;
her white bones will be spread by the winds…

Nevertheless, I do want to believe in Heaven
over the seventh sky, or somewhere—
a fabulous, magnificent heaven—
somewhere where my mother would reach
after crossing the bridge,
the Pulsirat— which seems so impossible to cross.

And there, once she has passed that bridge
with the greatest ease,
a very handsome man, the Prophet Muhammed,
will welcome her, embrace her.
He will feel her melt upon his broad chest.

She will wish to take a shower in the fountain;
she will wish to dance, to jump with joy;
she will be able to do all the things
that she has never done before.

A pheasant will arrive on a golden tray.
My mother will eat to her heart’s content.
Allah Himself will come by foot into the garden to meet her;
he will put a red flower into her hair,
kiss her passionately.

She will sleep on a soft feather bed;
she will be fanned by seven hundred Hur, the virgins
and be served cool water in silver pitcher
by beautiful gelban, the young angels.

She will laugh,
her whole body will stir with enormous happiness.
She will forget her miserable life on Earth…

An atheist,
How good I feel
just to imagine
somewhere there is a heaven
Taslima Nasreen is a Bangladeshi writer who was forced into exile by a death fatwa by the Islamists. She was granted an asylum in India but had to leave because of the politics of the major political parties. She is currently in Sweden and will move to France in February, although she prefers to live in Bangladesh or India. Her website is http://taslimanasrin.com/ Ed.

Statistics show that one in four or one in five women in Europe have been victims of male violence, and it is one of the most important causes of mortality for women in Europe. Given the enormity of the issue for society as a whole, and the numerous individual lives devastated, the silence surrounding these realities are ever the more unacceptable. Violence against women is not only a huge important public health issue, and it is also costly for society. Violence against women is also a matter of democracy, human rights and equality. The 16 days of activism this year celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, highlighting that women’s rights are an integral part of the human rights struggle and that women and girls have a right to grow up free from male violence. Policymakers must do all they can to uphold this basic right if Europe wants to aspire to be a region that respect the fundamental principles of human rights and gender equality.

http://www.womenlobby.org/site/1actions.asp?DocID=2413&v1ID=&RevID=&namePage=&pageParent=&DocID_sousmenu=

by D. Banyopadhyay

After all, the Tatas made their primary accumulation of capital through opium trade in China in the nineteenth century. Use of opium was prohibited under law in China. The East India Company and its minor trading partners, among which the Tatas were one, started illegal importation of opium into China from India. The Chinese Government strongly objected to this. The British waged the first Opium War (1839-42) in which China lost resulting in the Treaty of Nanjing, 1842. It imposed insulting and highly unfavourable conditions against China and in favour of the British. Then there was a second Opium War in 1856-60 wherein the British triumphed again and forcibly legalised contraband trade in opium in China. The Tatas and a few other Indian traders made enormous profit from this trade in a contraband commodity in China. Wealth creates hauteur. Hence we may excuse Tata for his slightly less than civilised behaviour in slandering Ms Mamata Banerjee at the press conference. He did not show any concern for or kindness to the land losers of Singur but it is reported that he donated US$ 50 million to Cornell University only recently.

http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article1077.html

by A. G. Noorani

“POLITICS is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom.” It is too much to expect people who went on television to grab whatever publicity they could, in the wake of the terrorist strikes in Mumbai, to read Professor Bernard Crick’s mini-classic In Defence of Politics, or, for that matter, any serious work that bears on the subject. The anchors who invited them were of the same class. The people, exasperated at the lapses of the state, understandably responded to the shrill, sweeping denunciation of politicians and politics. They could not be expected to recall that the loudest among the member panelists was an ardent supporter of Indira Gandhi and the dictatorship she imposed on India.

http://frontlineonnet.com/stories/20090130260207900.htm

by Glen Ford
It’s hard to believe that a generation ago, the Congressional Black Caucus was known as “the conscience of the congress, a political and moral high ground long deserted by the current CBC, which has utterly collapsed under Israel-lobby pressure for the second time in three years.
All but two Black lawmakers voted either “Yes” or “Present” on a Resolution that absolved Israel for its crimes against humanity in Gaza – placing all blame on Hamas. In 2006, only two Black Caucus members opposed a Resolution supporting Israel’s savage destruction if Lebanon’s infrastructure and the killing of 1,000 people. Hypocritically turning their backs both on Black public opinion and on the work of Dr. King, whose name they invoke at every public opportunity, the CBC has put itself “out of the anti-war business,” and well outside the mainstream of Black opinion on the Israel-Palestine question.”
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=980&Itemid=1