Terror and starvation in Gaza

By John Pilger
January 18th, 2007

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. “Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide,” wrote the former senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then foreign minister of Sweden, in Le Figaro. They described a people “living in a cage”, cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.

Egeland and Eliasson wrote this four months ago in an attempt to break the silence in Europe, whose obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year’s Palestinian elections. The horror in Gaza has since been compounded: a family of 18 has died beneath a 500lb US/Israeli bomb; unarmed women have been mown down at point-blank range. Dr David Halpin, one of the few Britons to break what he calls “this medieval siege”, reported the killing of 57 children by artillery, rockets and small arms and was shown evidence that civilians are Israel’s true targets, as in Leba non last summer. A friend in Gaza, Dr Mona el-Farra, emailed: “I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms [a collective punishment by the Israeli air force] and artillery on my 13-year-old daughter. At night, she shivers with fear. Then both of us end up crouching on the floor. I try to make her feel safe, but when the bombs sound I flinch and scream . . .” (more…)

Lost in Translation
Experts confirm that Iran’s president did not call for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’

The fake “translation” has been used by Jewish supremacists to drag America closer yet to another war for Israel. House Reps. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) have initiated a “resolution” sponosred by 22 congress members that says Ahmadinejad is guilty of violating the 1948 Convention on Genocide. Since the Convention “prohibits ‘direct and public incitement to commit genocide… Ahmadinejad’s hateful rhetoric calling for the elimination of Israel, a Member State of the United Nations, qualifies as inciting genocide.” Rothman is experienced in these kinds of weasel tactics. In 2005 a similar “resolution” helped engineer the prosecution of a Lithuanian paper for questioning Zionism. Jewish supremacists are very fond of “criminalizing” speech they don’t like; not only is the Bill of Rights one of their victims, but soon unknown numbers of US youth driven into a war on Iran may be as well — V-News

By Jonathan Steele
January 16th, 2007

My recent comment piece explaining how Iran’s president was badly misquoted when he allegedly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” has caused a welcome little storm. The phrase has been seized on by western and Israeli hawks to re-double suspicions of the Iranian government’s intentions, so it is important to get the truth of what he really said.

I took my translation - “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” - from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole’s website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter’s original “wiped off the map” translation.

Joining the “off the map” crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won’t waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u). (…..Full Article Here)