Bubblehammerblog

The Fatah activist said, regarding the rockets fired at Israel from Gaza,'Well, America should supply Palestinians with the same weapons they give the Israelis. Then they would not have to fire inaccurate home-made rockets. It would be precision bombing.'

Breaking Gaza’s Will - Israel’s Enduring Fantasy
By Ramzy Baroud

"I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons," Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who had recently returned from Gaza told reporters in Oslo.

"This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres

"We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb, because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations."

The dreadful weapons are known as dense inert metal explosives (DIME), "an experimental kind of explosive" but only one of several new weapons that Israel has been using in Gaza, the world's most densely populated regions.

Israel could not possibly have found a better place to experiment with DIME or the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas than Gaza.

The hapless inhabitants of the strip have been disowned. The power of the media, political coercion, intimidation and manipulation have demonised this imprisoned nation fighting for its life in the tiny spaces left of its land.



Chomsky.... interview

...right in the middle of the Gaza attack, December 31, the Pentagon announced that it was commissioning a German ship to send 3,000 tons of war material to Israel. That did not work out, because the government of Greece prevented it but it was supposed to go through Greece but it could all go through somewhere else. This is right in the middle of the attack on Gaza.

Actually there were very little reporting, very few inquiries. The Pentagon responded in an interesting way. They said, well this material won't be used for the attack on Gaza, in fact they knew that Israel had plans to stop the attack right before the inauguration, so that Obama would not have to say anything about it.


New Bolivian Constitution...

If approved, the charter will enshrine the Aymara moral code as the state's ethical principal: "ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa" (Don't be lazy, don't be a liar, don't be a thief.)

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As the sun sank over Cheney/Bush era, people around Bush started reminding him that he needed a Legacy. All Presidents need a Legacy, even ones who might have made a few mistakes. Look at Nixon, resigned from office in disgrace to avoid impeachment, but left a tour of China as his legacy.

'Yeah, said Bush, don't want some schoolkid in Crawford opening a book in a 100 years time, and thinking, who's this GW Bush asshole?'

For reasons not easy to get to the bottom of, Bush decided to make a Palestinian - Israeli settlement his legacy. He would broker a deal between the two parties - giving Israel security, and the US a friendly and compliant Palestinian administration. The US had been working with Mahmood Abbas and the Palestinian Authority for some time, helping them set up a viable civil administration, and arming and training the PA Security Services. All that was needed now, Bush heard from his advisors, was an election, like the one we had in Eye-rak. Looks great on CNN, and would strengthen Abbas's hand when he negotiates Palestine away to the Israelis.

Those in Mahmood Abbas's faction in Fatah were not keen on elections in 2006, it was too soon, they hadn't completed the roundup and arrest of Islamist and other opposition leaders, and they thought they might not win. But the clock was ticking on Bush's Legacy, so pressure was put on the PA, their misgivings were ignored, and the elections went ahead.

Hamas won 56% of the seats in the Palestinian Legislative Assembly. Condoleeza Rice claimed surprise at the result, 'I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by it', she told a press conference. 'Who the fuck recommended this?', said an outraged Pentagon official.

It's at this point we begin to glimpse the mind of a great leader and thinker at work. The single biggest obstacle standing in the way of his peace settlement Legacy, Hamas, the Islamist terst organisation, had become the democratically elected majority in the Palestinian government. He needed a strategy. He asked around, but in the end decided himself. Here it comes... Saddle up boys, we're gonna run 'em outa town.


He was going to bring about a Palestinian civil war. For this purpose he put to work 'our boy', as he called him, Mohammad Dahlan, CIA asset and director of the PA's Preventive Security Service, a highly professional, US trained, Fatah goon squad. With the nod from the Israelis, the US arranged a tool-up shipment, via friendly Arab countries, of $120m in light arms and cash.

This is what fuelled the violence, killing hundreds of people, that resulted in the Hamas takeover of Gaza. How long was it going to be before the Israelis took on Hamas?

This is a much abbreviated version of a story by David Rose in the current Vanity Fair. You are urged to read it,HERE.

Extracts:

With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
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Again, on Obama's remark about 'facing down Communism and fascism'. Didn't they sound oddly old fashioned? If we sit for a moment in a quiet, fragrant room, perhaps recall a haiku to evoke a state of receptiveness, we can decode these two words more easily.

Communism points in the direction of what's been called the pink tide, rising in Latin America. The regimes Alberto Morales in Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, are both in the process of disentangling their economies from US corporate interests, and are using the proceeds of the sale of their resources to improve the lives of the poor. To the Imperial Court and its scribes this is beginning to look like Socialism, or worse.

Chavez wears fatigues and a red beret, and has very cordial relations with Fidel. Morales is a decent Indigenous person, but all kinds of leftwing schemers have his ear.

Obama's new advisor on Bolivia, Greg Craig, heads a legal team that represents former President of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a rightwing hardman, who once had a good business privatising Bolivian companies and selling them off to US corporations. Craig's view of Bolivia is that Morales is leading 'an offensive against Democracy'. Note the military turn of phrase.

Fascism clearly means Islamofacism, a term now beginning to be preferred to Bush's less specific 'Tursts', a word showing signs of becoming meaningless through repetition.

A paper further examining the meaning and provenance of these terms in relation to US Foreign Policy is in preparation.

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While President Obama strikes out to his second day in office, he should take some time to consider the increasing resemblance to Fascism being exhibited by the Israeli regime. Their military spokeswoman accused Hamas of being a racist antisemitic organisation, built upon the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just the sort of people who would push women and children in front of tanks. Ehud Olmert feels the pain of every Palestinian civilian casualty, and Tzippi Livni tells us everything is as it should be in the Gaza Strip. The PR was planned long before the bombers took off, as was the timing of the calloff to coincide with Obama's inauguration.

There's an interview here with Noam Chomsky about the Israeli attack on Gaza. For those who haven't the time to read it all here's a short piece :

Ehud Olmert was in the United States in May 2006 a couple of months after the withdrawal. He simply announced to a joint session of Congress and to rousing applause, that the historic right of Jews to the entire land of Israel is beyond question. He announced what he called his convergence program, which is just a version of the traditional program; it goes back to the Allon plan of 1967. Israel would essentially annex valuable land and resources near the green line (the 1967 border). That land is now behind the wall that Israel built in the West Bank, which is an annexation wall. That means the arable land, the main water resources, the pleasant suburbs around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the hills and so on. They'll take over the Jordan valley, which is about a third of the West Bank, where they've been settling since the late 60s. Then they'll drive a couple of super highways through the whole territory — there's one to the east of Jerusalem to the town of Ma'aleh Adumim which was built mostly in the 1990s, during the Oslo years. It was built essentially to bisect the West Bank and are two others up north that includes Ariel and Kedumim and other towns which pretty much bisect what's left. They'll set up check points and all sorts of means of harassment in the other areas and the population that's left will be essentially cantonized and unable to live a decent life and if they want to leave, great. Or else they will be picturesque figures for tourists — you know somebody leading a goat up a hill in the distance — and meanwhile Israelis, including settlers, will drive around on "Israeli only" super highways. Palestinians can make do with some little road somewhere where you're falling into a ditch if it's raining. That's the goal. And it's explicit. You can't accuse them of deception because it's explicit. And it's cheered here.

Robert Fisk speculates here about the chances of a War Crimes Tribunal to investigate Israeli attacks on schools and UN compounds, and the use of chemical weapons on Palestinian civilians:

After killing hundreds of women and children, Israel was the good guy again, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire that Hamas was certain to break. But Obama will be smiling on Tuesday. Was not this the reason, after all, why Israel suddenly wanted a truce?

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I found this available for printing on to teeshirts, caps, mugs and keyrings at the Zionist public relations operation over at Atlas Shrugs. Bottom Right.

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I'm something of a connoisseur of bad sitcoms. The British have a distinguished history of making them, stretching back to the birth of television. As you might expect, nearly all have social class as a central theme, wherein assorted stand-ins for the ranks of the social order jostle and collide, mostly resulting in very disappointing entertainment. I can't imagine that foreigners could understand them. There have been some fine exceptions, a portrait of a brooding Tony Hancock hangs in my hallway, but I would estimate that around a shocking 80% of the sitcoms made here have been very bad.

I particularly relish bad middle class sitcoms. This is because, as my mate Peter Hitchens wrote in the Mail on Sunday, people like me hate the middle classes, the Yeomanry of England. He was talking about the Left in general, but then went on accuse New Labour of a secret agenda to punish and abuse the middle class. A delusional notion that lends me to suspect the man might not be a full shilling.

I do admit to some prejudice towards the middle classes, but hate is far too strong a word. It might be something to do with being able to trace my ancestry though three generations of industrial workers that makes me look upon them from a certain vantage. Sometimes with horrified fascination, sometimes amused contempt, a bit of resentment. This is not hate.

At one time, because of a prolonged insomnia brought about by a drugs shortage, I used to get up at 6am to watch repeats of Surgical Spirit, which might have made a good title for a dour comedy about Glasgow lowlife, but was a ripe and nerve twanging example of its genre, about posh doctors and their curiously distracted and shallow relationships.

If you share my taste for sitcom shite, perhaps with a couple of blue Valium, BBC 3 is presenting at the moment some proper laugh free material with moderate squirming.

According to BBC 3, Grown Ups is an Adult sitcom about the trials and tribulations of being a twentysomething, where adult means material of a sexual nature. Its very thin on any full on sex capers, so they do a lot of going through doors talking about shagging, knob size, dry humping soft furnishings, and premature ejaculation. The crevice at the heart of this show, down which the laughs fall, is the character's unbearable lightness of being.

Grant, for instance, is supposed to be a solicitor. I've had some experience of hiring solicitors, on mission critical briefs, and if I spotted someone like Grant so much as collecting the office teacups I'd take my business elsewhere. The Law Society should contact BBC 3 to discuss a possible Bringing to Disrepute action, in that the program suggests that people like Grant, clearly delusional and undergoing a hyperexcitable episode, are given licenses to practice law.

Yes, the pert Sheridan Smith as Michell manages be faintly arousing, but you feel it might involve taking advantage of the afflicted. Here's the storyline she battles, In a bid to win Grant over, Michelle throws herself in the canal. I don't think I can add to that.

A sitcom can jump the shark, or to use an expression from the last century, become too daft to laugh at, as soon as the first episode, like Grown Ups. Two Pint of Lager and a packet of Crisps, with Sheridan Smith playing a single mother partnered with a halfwit, did so when it introduced a Shakespearian poltroon as Gaz's drain bandaged brother, further enfeebling the overall signal to the funnybone, already strained by the disturbing Louise, making you want the Social Services take her away before she cuts someone with with the scissors in her handbag.

My favourite good sitcom of the last few years has been Curb Your Enthusiasm. A masterpiece.

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I stumbled upon a comment posted on the rabid Zionist and Islamaphobe Atlas Shrugs blog, (available for inspection on my Blogwatch), from a Mr Ibrahim, who claims to be a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, entitled 'A Letter to my Arab Brothers and Sisters.' Mr Ibrahim says that resistance to Israel is futile, and until it is abandoned Palestinians can only expect further death and destruction. He cites Egypt and Jordan as examples of the benefits afforded by this realisation. Since these countries ceased supporting the Palestinian's struggle they have been rewarded generously by the US, and are now experiencing development and prosperity. Further, most other Arabs couldn't care less about the plight of the Palestinians. Those in the Gulf are too busy spending their vast oil revenues on impressive cultural and educational projects, while in the Magreb they're preoccupied with simply developing their societies out of poverty.

Only Syria continues to actively support the Palestinians, but does so only for its own cynically self-serving purposes, such as pleasing its paymaster, Iran. Likewise the PLO has been for the most part just a means for the leadership to enrich itself at the expense of sympathetic donors and the Palestinian people - Yasser Arafat being a prime example of one who lined the pockets of his family.

It's no use, Mr Ibrahim's letter goes on, elderly Palestinians waving the keys to their former homes in Jaffa or Nazareth, to where there will never be any return for them. Palestinians must accept that the are a defeated people. Only once the struggle to 'liberate' Palestine is abandoned can the situation move on. He suggests that the Israelis, and the US, will be generous victors. When reality is accepted, and the resistance is abandoned, peace and democracy can begin to be built in that part of historic Palestine that remains to its people.

While readers digest these points, it's worth having a look at the sort of generosity in victory that the Zionists might extend to the defeated Palestinians, by turning to how Israeli Arabs, some 25% of Israel's population, are treated. Many Israeli Arabs, including their representatives in the Knesset, understandably felt strongly about the massacre of their people in Gaza. Many demonstrated, and made a fuss. Israel responded with mass arrests, and imposed a ban on the political parties that represent them from taking part in the forthcoming (democratic) elections. Not content with disenfranchising Israeli Arabs, some in the Knesset are proposing that they be expelled from the country, and are actively campaigning to that end. Read about it HERE

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The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in this op-ed piece, reveals the true purpose of the Israeli terror bombing and chemical weapons attacks on Palestinian civilians. It's an educational project.

Citing with approval the salutary educational success of the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanese civilians, Friedman's pro-terrorism argument offers a promising new approach to terror organisations worldwide. Hamas might argue that their rocket attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon are intended to educate Israeli civilians that they cannot continue to enjoy their Californian lifestyles while their Palestinian neighbors suffer oppression and death at the hands of the Israeli government.

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Palestinians and other oppressed peoples should not waste their time with expectations that the coming inauguration of Barack Obama will signal any real change in US foreign policy. His VP Joe Biden is a self confessed Zionist, his choice of the barefaced opportunist Hillary Clinton indicates broad continuity with Cheney/Bush policies for the Middle East, and one of his most significant staff appointees, Rahm Emanuel, is in fact a former member of the terrorist Israeli Defense Forces.

Obama is a fully integrated member of the craven US political establishment. His skin colour is of negligible significance. Before the election the Republican Party approached Colin Powell to run for the presidency, he refused. Had he accepted, the ambition crazed Condoleeza Rice would have needed no persuasion to become his running mate. This ticket might well have carried the election. The US Empire would then have been headed by two people of colour.

The recent US Congress resolution in support of Israeli aggression in Gaza was almost unanimously carried. I knew the names of the two who voted against before it was announced - Ron Paul, and the excellent Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is an honorable and principled defender of the US Constitution. Dennis Kucinich was the most prominent supporter of moves to impeach Cheney/Bush over the Iraq war.

Why this overwhelming consensus on a policy issue inside the US political establishment, a phenomena surely unique outside total dictatorships, like Saddam Hussein's? The main answer has to be the hugely influential and massively funded Israeli lobbying apparatus. When yesterday Ehud Olmert bragged that he'd 'phoned Bush, had him dragged from the podium in the middle of a speech, and instructed him to tell Condoleeza Rice how to vote at the UN, I, for one, believed him, despite the flurry of face-saving American denials. The truth is that without the nod from AIPAC, Obama could not have won the election.

Because of the might of the Zionist lobby, the US media continues to present its audience with a discontinuous, ahistorical narrative about the Zionist and Palestinian conflict. This is a depressing feature of American public political discourse in general, but on this issue it's particularly blatant. An illiterate Punjabi peasant could retell the story of Palestinian dispossession and oppression at the hands of the Zionists more accurately than many educated Americans.

At times I've switched from the unbearable and heartbreaking scenes of dead and injured Gaza children shown on Al Jazeera to CNN. Of course, the major concern expressed there is the Hamas rockets fired from 'refugee camps' into Southern Israel. Not once have I seen it explained to CNN viewers why it is that Palestinians are living in refugee camps, and where exactly they originally came from. Not unexpectedly, Americans are not allowed by their government to receive Al Jazeera, the only TV network with correspondents inside Gaza.

As most of the World knows, the State of Israel could not have been brought into being and sustained had its creation not served the strategic interests of the West, Britain and the US in particular. There was also the question of salving the bad conscience of the West over its inaction, and in some cases complicity, over the mass murder of European Jews. The Palestinians continue to pay the price for this. I know it's a fading dream, but one once shared by many Palestinians and non-Zionist Jews, but might there still be a solution to this tragedy through a democratic and independent Palestine for Jews and Arabs alike? The dying 'One State Solution', with 'Do Not Resuscitate' above it's bed.

I've heard it said that one reason for America's sympathy for Zionism is that they too are a settler nation, built on the expropriation and extermination of the original inhabitants of its land. Perhaps the Palestinians will eventually share the fate of the Native Americans. Many will simply fade away, while others live on reservations, and eventually succumb to alcoholism and drug addiction, and the luckier ones might thrive as tourist attractions or casino operators.
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Watching the war criminal Tony Blair yesterday receiving his medal from George Bush for contributions to global 'peace and democracy', I could only be reminded of Tom Lehrer's remark that 'satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'.

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The parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto and what's happening now in Gaza can't be easily be pushed aside as irrelevant. The Jews of Warsaw were ethnically cleansed, to use a vile expression not invented then, and herded inside a densely populated military cordon, where they were deprived of food and clean water, medical supplies, and the light and heat needed to make life tolerable. Their only friends beyond the walls and barbed wire were a few Communists and some Polish people of conscience. The Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations were denied access. When the Nazis assured the World that all was well there were plenty willing to believe them.

Present day Israelis honor the brave men and women of the Warsaw Ghetto who were able and willing to resist Nazi barbarism; rightly so, they were an inspiration to the human spirit. Armed with a few inadequate weapons stolen from the enemy, passed to them by sympathisers, or made from whatever materials they could lay hands on, they faced the most technologically advanced army in the World, knowing that acts of resistance would bring massively disproportionate retaliation.

When the Zionists say, 'No country in the World would allow its citizens to face daily rocket attacks without a response', they should recall the Warsaw Ghetto. No people in the World would allow themselves to be forcibly driven from their land, herded into ghettos and refugee camps, slowly starved by an encircling military cordon, then bombed from the air and shelled by tanks and warships, and be expected not to resist in any way they can.

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No posts for the past few weeks. My laptop was smashed up by my sister-in-law, and it's taken this long to get it up and running again, though with limited capabilities.

She stayed with us for a week or so following a death in the family. A less than delightful woman when sober, she becomes a screaming maniac after a few drinks. Australians call such people 'two pot screamers', which is appropriate. For reasons she's kept to herself she picked up my laptop from the kitchen table and smashed it down a couple of times with full force, amazingly destroying only the hard drive in the process.

The widow of a celebrated professor of Media Studies at a prestigious university, she has more than enough spare cash to replace the laptop, but denies all memory of the incident. I had to replace the hard drive myself. This is the second time her berserk antics have cost me dearly. Previously I lost more than £5000 when she called the police when drunk and reported me for certain admittedly illegal, but in no way immoral, activities I happened to be engaged in.

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