Ireland’s foreign minister on Friday called the (Admin edit: Jewish state)… blockade of Palestinian-ruled Gaza inhumane and unacceptable and he urged the European Union and other countries to increase pressure on Israel to end it.

Micheal Martin, who visited Gaza last week, was the first EU foreign minister to enter the Mediterranean coastal strip in over a year, an area that was severely damaged in a… (Admin edit: Jewish state) offensive in December 2008.

More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the three-week war in Gaza, which (the)(Admin edit: Jewish state) launched following months of rocket fire from the territory into (the)(Admin edit: Jewish state).

“The tragedy of Gaza is that it is fast in danger of becoming a tolerated humanitarian crisis,” Martin wrote in an opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune, describing conditions as medieval, inhumane and utterly unacceptable.

“(It is) a situation that is proving extremely difficult to remedy or ameliorate due to the blockade and the wider ramifications of efforts to try and achieve political progress in the Middle East.”

He will raise the issue at a EU foreign ministers meeting in Cordoba, Spain, this weekend, he said. The EU Commission and EU member states are the largest aid donors to Gaza.

A United Nations report by a team headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone last September said that both the Israeli army and Islamist group Hamas, which controls Gaza, were guilty of war crimes in them conflict but focused more on the(Admin edit: Jewish state). (The)(Admin edit: Jewish state) which refused to cooperate with the Goldstone report, condemned it as distorted and biased and rejected the war crimes allegations. Hamas denied its fighters committed war crimes but has said it regrets (Admin edit: Jewish state) civilian deaths.

The United States pressed (the)(Admin edit: Jewish state)to ease the blockade last week and Martin said with 80 percent of the population of Gaza now living below the poverty line and over 50 percent out of work, the blockade was counterproductive.

“What I witnessed in Gaza, amidst all the rubble and devastation, was a population traumatized and reduced to poverty by an unjust and completely counterproductive blockade.”

Source

Admin Note: It is NOT PERMISSIBLE for Muslims to use the name of a holy Prophet to describe the belligerent malignancy of the Jewish State, may Allah’s curse be upon them.

In a priority European Parliament question tabled to the European Commission, Proinsias De Rossa MEP said the almost-certain abuse by Mossad of Irish and other European passports in the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on 20th January necessitated a halt to the upgrading of relations with Israel and a full review of the 2004 EU legislation aimed at preventing the forgery and abuse of Member States’ passports.*

Mr De Rossa said: “The misuse of Irish and other EU Member States’ passports in this crime should not divert attention from Israel’s murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, its brutal assault on Gaza last year, causing the deaths of hundreds of civilians including over 300 children, and its continuing blockade of 1.5 million people in Gaza – all of which are clear demonstrations of Israel’s continuing disregard for international law.

“The murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a leading Hamas militant, raises ‘profoundly disturbing’ issues for Europe as the EU Foreign Ministers acknowledged in their 22nd February statement.

“The European Union is committed under the Lisbon Treaty to providing its citizens with ‘an area of freedom, security and justice’. However the use of forged European passports in the Dubai crime undermines that commitment and casts doubt on the security of all European passports and on the ability of all Europeans to travel in safety worldwide. Indeed, while the theft was a direct attack on the sovereignty of the four Member States concerned and of Australia, the sovereignty of all Member States is at risk unless Israel is obliged to comply with International law.

“Europe has to urgently review all aspects of its relations with Israel and put on hold any further upgrading of EU-Israeli relations until Israel complies in all respects with its obligations under international law and its commitments under EU-Israel agreements.

“In their 22nd February statement, the 27 EU Foreign Ministers sought to reassure all Europeans that their passports remain among the most secure in the world and included a ‘range of physical security measure to prevent forgery and abuse’. “The simple fact is that the protections offered by this legislation seem to have failed in this case. The European Commission must therefore undertake an immediate and full review of all the provisions and the implementation at national level of this legislation and present proposals to MEPs and Ministers to re-establish the integrity of European passports.”

Source: Labour

In a much-appreciated effort aimed at highlighting and exposing Israeli racism and terrorism against the Palestinian people, many university campuses around the world are marking Israel’s apartheid week.

Activities include lectures, demonstrations, films and other multi-media events as well as cultural performances and hearing testimonies from human rights activists and Palestinian victims of Israeli apartheid.

Speakers from many countries, especially occupied Palestine, will describe the deepening persecution of Palestinians which in many aspects has surpassed the worst measures ever adopted against the black majority by the defunct South African apartheid regime.

It is hoped that these events will encourage and generate more opposition to the criminal Israeli regime, especially in light of Israel’s murderous onslaught against the Gaza Strip last year when the Israeli army, air force and navy ganged up on the nearly totally defenseless inhabitants of the coastal enclave, mercilessly killing and maiming thousands of innocent civilians and destroying the bulk of the region’s civilian infrastructure.

Exposing Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity should therefore be viewed as an essential component in the enduring Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. It is also a pre-requisite for undermining the mendacious Israeli narrative, notoriously based on lies, half-truths and distortion of history.

Ultimately, the Palestinians and their allies and supporters can’t expose Israeli criminality without first defeating Israeli hasbara efforts. However, if we succeed in exposing Israel for what it really is, namely a criminal state that thrives on terror, theft and lies, as well as practicing ethnic cleansing and even genocide, we will be able to make a significant achievement which could signal the beginning of a strategic retreat of the Zionist scheme.

However, in order to go about achieving this task, we have to observe a number of principles that would help us avoid unnecessary mistakes and blunders.

First, we should maintain a continually-updated data bank containing a comprehensive and cohesive body of information pertaining to Israeli criminality and racism, including the Zionist state’s routine violation of human rights of non-Jews. This digitalized data bank is indispensable for fighting a successful battle for the hearts and minds of the world. Needless to say, this data bank should contain accurate statistical information about such topics as the number of civilians murdered by Israel, the number of homes demolished by the Israeli army, and the number of families ethnically cleansed by the Zionist state. It should also contain detailed information on the Jewish settlement expansion activities, the confiscated land, the annexation wall, as well as the organized pogroms and attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians by Nazi-like Jewish settlers.

Second, we should have detailed data on the increasingly rampant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Jewish racism in Israel, which in many respects resembles the anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda in Germany in the early and mid 1930s which eventually led to the mass murder of millions of people by the Nazis during World War II.

The Israeli media often publishes criminally racist remarks by Jewish religious and political leaders brazenly advocating mass murder of Palestinians. Such quotes, now readily available via the internet, can be used as an effective tool to expose the general Israeli discourse before the court of international public opinion. Needless to say, such quotes are neither anecdotal nor coming from marginal figures, and one would not really exaggerate much by saying that these poisoned views have come to represent a sizeable plurality if not an outright majority in the Zionist state.

Third, We should not hesitate to make comparisons between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what Nazi Germany did to Jews and non-Jews in the course of the Second World War. True, such comparisons would initially raise eyebrows in many quarters, especially in North America and Western Europe. However, as people get themselves emancipated from the stranglehold of Zionist propaganda by way of accessing irrefutable evidence pertaining to Israeli criminality and depravity, which is readily available, the raised eyebrows will eventually disappear as honest people would have no choice but to call the spade a spade, even when seen in Jewish hands.

In the final analysis, any group of people, including Jews, when behaving and acting like Nazis, should be compared with the Nazis. And Israel has been and is behaving like Nazis as we saw recently in Gaza when the Israeli army created firestorms over blockaded territory and exterminated hundreds of innocent people often by bombing their homes as they slept therein.

Fourth, in exposing Israeli criminality, we must always make meticulous efforts to deprive Israel of any opportunity to exploit unintended remarks or slips of the tongue to accuse us of indulging in anti-Semitism.

We must therefore make it abundantly clear that we are against anti-Semitism as much as we are against Zionism, and that we are struggling against Zionist Jews not because they are Jewish but rather because they are oppressors and murderers.

This is probably one of the most effective ways of thwarting Israeli attempts to lump anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in one category.

Israeli apologists and hasbara doctors would get mad at you, they would even go hysterical, as did former Israeli official Ra’anan Geisen recently during a debate with Professor Norman Finkelstein.

Maintain your calm, and don’t be intimidated by vociferous tactics and ravings. Then start refuting and debunking their arguments point by point, and never be tempted to fall into the trap of their distraction tactics.

They would invoke all types of diversionary arguments, such as gratifying themselves with talks about the number of Israeli Noble Prize laureates and Israeli achievements in science and technology. They would even invoke other atypical issues for the purpose of creating confusion.

You can retort briefly to these arguments by saying that while scientific achievements are important, pursuing justice and human decency is much more important. Remind your audience that the Nazis, too, had made strident steps in the fields of science and technology but that didn’t prevent them from committing some of the most horrible crimes under the sun.

They would repeat the claim that Zionists were only “returning” to their original homeland. Try to respond to such disinformation by asking a simple question like: “would you give up your home if someone came to you and told you that the home belonged to his ancestors 2000 or 3000 years ago? Through this very logical argument, you should be able to explain that the creation of Israel was an act of rape from the very inception and that it would remain an act of rape until the end of time.

Try to convince the audience that a country that builds hundreds of settlements on occupied land and transfers hundreds of thousands of its citizens to live on land that doesn’t belong to them doesn’t really want peace.

In fact, pro-Palestinian activism must get organized as much as possible, especially with the issue of countering Zionist propaganda. Hence, the proposed data bank should be constantly fed with every conceivable Zionist argument covering all aspects of the Palestinian plight, coupled with the best refutation. Luckily, a huge body of information is already available through the internet, which can tremendously facilitate this task.

Finally, it is important to make it amply clear that the cause of justice and freedom in occupied Palestine is not really about Palestinian nationalism, although a certain element of that dimension is always present.

The Palestinian struggle for justice and peace is undoubtedly the epicenter and ultimate test for humanity’s struggle for a future of peace and justice.

Hence, our message to the world should be that every decent and honest man and woman in this world should get involved in the efforts to isolate Zionism at every level. Zionism is a cancer upon the conscience of humanity and would eradicate us if we don’t eradicate it.

Source: Palestine Information Centre

MPAC.ie Comment: While we are loathe to associate the name of a holy prophet with the malignancy that presumes to name itself after him, we are constrained in this instance, and duly apologize. For more information on this, please read Shaikh Rabee’s Ruling on using the name Israel for the Jewish State.

A co-author of the Goldstone Gaza report, which accuses both Hamas and Israel of war crimes, claims the Gaza militant group fired only two rockets at Israel prior to last year’s winter conflict, according to a new report published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The report refers to recent remarks made by Desmond Travers, a retired Irish army colonel, who was one of four members of the fact-finding mission to Gaza and Israel.

Travers rejects the idea that Israel launched the offensive in Gaza on December 27, 2008, as an act of self-defense in response to Hamas rockets. The Jerusalem center report says he bases this idea on a “fact” that he presents that in the month prior to start of the war, only “something like two” rockets that fell on Israel.

The report quotes an extensive interview with Travers in the Middle East Monitor, in which he also says that Hamas had sought “a continuation of the cease-fire” prior to Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

Travers also rejects Israel Defense Forces photographs as proof that Hamas hid weapons in mosques during the conflict.

“I do not believe the photographs,” Travers said, describing the IDF evidence as “spurious.”

“The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.”

He also accuses “Jewish lobbyists” of influencing British foreign policy in the Middle East and says that efforts to block the Goldstone reports findings have failed.

“The court of world opinion seems determined to see the report prevail,” he said.Source

MPAC.ie Comment: It is time for the world to impose crippling sanctions upon this belligerent blight on the Middle East. We commend Col. Travers for his conviction. Jewish lobbyists have indeed been busy, but the world has seen the monstrous degeneracy of the Jewish state for the prevaricating miscreant it truly is.

Colonel Desmond Travers, a retired Irish army officer, in giving his report to the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and in response to Alan Shatter, said, “I am laying down the gauntlet, in that I guarantee the Deputy that Israel could have taken them out if it had wanted to. This is my challenge.”

In the view of this respected man, the Jewish Zionists could simply have, at any time, given the sophisticated weaponry they possess, taken the Hamas rockets out. They didn’t – instead they chose to bomb one of the most densely packed cities in the world, raining down white phosphorous and other illegal munitions on a wholly innocent population. In the space of a few weeks, the belligerent, warmongering Jews obliterated Gaza with more rockets and bombs than Hamas and all the other resistance groups combined had fired on the illegal occupiers of Palestinian land.

While it is important to consider the implications of the Goldstone Report from all angles, this can be best achieved by those who are both impartial and unattached. We are confident that if a Muslim were involved in this debate, there would be claims of bias, yet Shatter is permitted to obfuscate and encumber debates on the conflict with ‘Israeli’ propagandist irrelevance.

In such an important debate, all interests should be declared – unfortunately Mr Shatter’s are all too clear!

Everyone who is obliged by the Divine Shariah is responsible for the condition of the Ummah and he is on the frontiers of Islam. So Jihad, just as it is done with ones body is also carried out through the pen and by supplication…so give forth from yourselves and your wealth that will lead to the great bliss (success in the Hereafter).

Click here: Important advice to the Ummah regarding Palestine and Gaza

MPAC.ie Podcast

Telling it how it is!

On December 27, 2008, Israel began one of the bloodiest attacks on Gaza Since 1948. The three week assault killed some 1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. One year later, little to no rebuilding has taken place and the siege in Gaza continues.

One year has passed since the savage Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, but for the people there time might as well have stood still. Since Palestinians in Gaza buried their loved ones — more than 1,400 persons, almost 400 of them children — there has been little healing and virtually no reconstruction.

According to international aid agencies, only 41 trucks of building supplies have been allowed into Gaza during the year.

Promises of billions made at a donors’ conference in Egypt last March attended by luminaries of the so-called “international community” and the Middle East peace process industry are unfulfilled, and the Israeli siege, supported by the US, the European Union, Arab states, and tacitly by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, continues.

Amid the endless, horrifying statistics a few stand out: of Gaza’s 640 schools, 18 were completely destroyed and 280 damaged in Israeli attacks. Two-hundred-and-fifty students and 15 teachers were killed.

Of 122 health facilities assessed by the World Health Organization, 48 percent were damaged or destroyed.

Ninety percent of households in Gaza still experience power cuts for four to eight hours per day due to Israeli attacks on the power grid and degradation caused by the blockade.

Forty-six percent of Gaza’s once productive agricultural land is out of use due to Israeli damage to farms and Israeli-declared free fire zones. Gaza’s exports of more than 130,000 tons per year of tomatoes, flowers, strawberries and other fruit have fallen to zero.

That “much of Gaza still lies in ruins,” a coalition of international aid agencies stated recently, “is not an accident; it is a matter of policy.”

This policy has been clear all along and it has nothing to do with Israeli “security.”

From 19 June 2008, to 4 November 2008, calm prevailed between Israel and Gaza, as Hamas adhered strictly — as even Israel has acknowledged — to a negotiated ceasefire.

That ceasefire collapsed when Israel launched a surprise attack on Gaza killing six persons, after which Hamas and other resistance factions retaliated.

Even so, Palestinian factions were still willing to renew the ceasefire, but it was Israel that refused, choosing instead to launch a premeditated, systematic attack on the foundations of civilized life in the Gaza Strip.

Operation Cast Lead, as Israel dubbed it, was an attempt to destroy once and for all Palestinian resistance in general, and Hamas in particular, which had won the 2006 election and survived the blockade and numerous US-sponsored attempts to undermine and overthrow it in cooperation with US-backed Palestinian militias.

Like the murderous sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s, the blockade of Gaza was calculated to deprive civilians of basic necessities, rights and dignity in the hope that their suffering might force their leadership to surrender or collapse.

In many respects things may seem more dire than a year ago.

Barack Obama, the US president, whom many hoped would change the vicious anti-Palestinian policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, has instead entrenched them as even the pretense of a serious peace effort has vanished.

According to media reports, the US Army Corps of Engineers is assisting Egypt in building an underground wall on its border with Gaza to block the tunnels which act as a lifeline for the besieged territory (resources and efforts that ought to go into rebuilding still hurricane-devastated New Orleans), and American weapons continue to flow to West Bank militias engaged in a US- and Israeli-sponsored civil war against Hamas and anyone else who might resist Israeli occupation and colonization.

These facts are inescapable and bleak.

However, to focus on them alone would be to miss a much more dynamic situation that suggests Israel’s power and impunity are not as invulnerable as they appear from this snapshot.

A year after Israel’s attack and after more than two-and-a-half years of blockade, the Palestinian people in Gaza have not surrendered. Instead they have offered the world lessons in steadfastness and dignity, even at an appalling, unimaginable cost.

It is true that the European Union leaders who came to occupied Jerusalem last January to publicly embrace Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister — while white phosphorus seared the flesh of Gazan children and bodies lay under the rubble — still cower before their respective Israel lobbies, as do American and Canadian politicians.

But the shift in public opinion is palpable as Israel’s own actions transform it into a pariah whose driving forces are not the liberal democratic values with which it claims to identify, but ultra-nationalism, racism, religious fanaticism, settler-colonialism and a Jewish supremacist order maintained by frequent massacres.

The universalist cause of justice and liberation for Palestinians is gaining adherents and momentum especially among the young. I witnessed it, for example, among Malaysian students I met at a Palestine solidarity conference held by the Union of NGOs of The Islamic World in Istanbul last May, and again in November as hundreds of student organizers from across the US and Canada converged to plan their participation in the global Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the successful struggle against South African apartheid in the 1980s.

This week, thousands of people from dozens of countries are attempting to reach Gaza to break the siege and march alongside Palestinians who have been organizing inside the territory.

Each of the individuals traveling with the Gaza Freedom March, Viva Palestina, or other delegations represents perhaps hundreds of others who could not make the journey in person, and who are marking the event with demonstrations and commemorations, visits to their elected officials and media campaigns.
Against this flowering of activism, Zionism is struggling to rejuvenate its dwindling base of support. Multi-million dollar programs aimed at recruiting and Zionizing young American Jews are struggling to compete against organizations like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which run not on money but principled commitment to human equality.

Increasingly, we see that Israel’s hasbara (propaganda) efforts have no positive message, offer no plausible case for maintaining a status quo of unspeakable repression and violence, and rely instead on racist demonization and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims to justify Israel’s actions and even its very existence.

Faced with growing global recognition and support for the courageous nonviolent struggle against continued land theft in the West Bank, Israel is escalating its violence and kidnapping of leaders of the movement in Bilin and other villages (Mohammad Othman, Jamal Juma’ and Abdallah Abu Rahmeh are among the leaders of this movement recently arrested).

In acting this way, Israel increasingly resembles a bankrupt failed state, not a regime confident about its legitimacy and longevity.

And despite the failed peace process industry’s efforts to ridicule, suppress and marginalize it, there is a growing debate among Palestinians and even among Israelis about a shared future in Palestine/Israel based on equality and decolonization, rather than ethno-national segregation and forced repartition.
Last, but certainly not least, in the shadow of the Goldstone report, Israeli leaders travel around the world fearing arrest for their crimes.

For now, they can rely on the impunity that high-level international complicity and their inertial power and influence still afford them. But the question for the real international community — made up of people and movements — is whether we want to continue to see the still very incomplete system of international law and justice painstakingly built since the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi holocaust dismantled and corrupted all for the sake of one rogue state.

What we have done in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine is not yet enough. But our movement is growing, it cannot be stopped, and we will reach our destination.

Source: ei

Sirens wailed across Gaza Stip on Sunday as the still-devastated Strip marked one year since the start of Israel’s deadliest offensive ever launched on the territory.

Events marking the anniversary began with sirens sounding at 11:20 am (0920 GMT), when the first bombs of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead.”
Senior Hamas leader Ahmed Bahar struck a defiant tone, saying the “will of the steadfast and the resistance was victorious” at a ceremony unveiling a war memorial with the names of hundreds of Palestinians killed in the fighting.

“Gaza was steadfast and did not fall in this ugly, destructive war… And the resistance, which defended its land with honor, was not broken,” he said.
“We call on all the sons of our people to unite and to take to the trenches of the resistance to face the criminal Zionist occupation.”

Several demonstrations were to be held during the day and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya was to make a television address in the evening, with Hamas planning to stage events for 22 days, the length of the war.

On Saturday, December 27, 2008, Israeli warplanes launched simultaneous strikes on numerous Hamas targets throughout the territory of 1.5 million people, raids that killed at least 225 people in what was one of the bloodiest single days in the decades-long Israeli-Arab conflict.

The war ended 22 days later with mutual ceasefires by Israel and Hamas, with some 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 400 children, and 13 Israeli soldiers were killed. Entire neighborhoods of Gaza were flattened in the onslaught, which also wounded more than 5,500 people.

“Those were dark days. There was killing in every street and alley,” said Dr Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services, who had 16 paramedics killed as they struggled to collect the wounded.

“The time has come now for unity and peace and justice and an end to the blockade,” he said, referring to Israeli and Egyptian border closures that have sealed Gaza off from all but basic goods since Hamas won democratic elections in June 2007.

During the war, Israel committed war crimes by using US-made internationally banned weapons like Phosphorus gas. Israeli occupation troops also committed field executions of civilians holding white flags after they ordered them out of their houses.

Al Manar

Just as the world was beginning to ask the right questions regarding the belligerent Zionist state, another attempted attack by a so-called extremist takes place and suddenly the focus is once again taken off the worst perpetrators of terrorism in the 20th and 21st century – ‘Israel’.

We will now hear a litany of reports on the so-called road to extremism that led to brother Umar’s actions, and we will hear of what might have happened to the passengers on board flight 253. In the meantime, the families of 1,400+ Gazans who died at the hands of Jewish terrorists last year yearn for justice and perhaps most disconcertingly, British laws will be changed to allow Jewish perpetrators of war crimes unfettered access to Britain.

Who gains from brother Umar’s actions, this is the question we need to ask!