Nicola Nasser

Stubbornly insisting on getting the carriage before the horse as the approach to a “durable and sustainable” ceasefire in Gaza Strip, U.S. and European diplomacy in particular is building on an Israeli misleading premise that the 22 – day military operation, dubbed “Cast Lead,” against the Palestinian Gaza Strip was a reaction and not a premeditated long planned scheme that found in the change of guards in Washington D.C. an excellent timing. It was “not simply a reaction,” but “a calculation," Daniel Klaidman wrote in Newsweek on January 10.

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Joel S. Hirschhorn

By now most Americans have experienced extreme disgust upon hearing about the nearly $20 billion in bonuses given to people in New York City’s financial sector at the end of 2008. After sending the nation into the current economic black hole there is no way of comprehending the audacity of financial company executives in giving themselves and their colleagues shameful rewards for abysmal and disgraceful performance. Other than screaming and moaning about all this dishonorable behavior what should the Obama administration and Congress do?

Here is the solution that the overwhelming majority of Americans should demand: A law should be immediately passed that imposes a new special federal income tax of 99 percent on all income in excess of $500,000 annually for single taxpayers and $1 million for couples, starting for 2008 income. Call it a greed tax. Call it justice. Call it getting even for too many years of uncontrolled greed that has given the nation nothing but economic injustice and inequality, and given capitalism a very bad name. Call it a sensible way to raise federal revenues to help offset the cancerous national debt.

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Mary Rizzo

The World Economic Forum at Davos had an incredible moment of truth… After Shimon Peres was allowed to justify the wanton killing that the Jewish State engaged in over the territory they have strangled with their inhumane blockade, (and received applause for it by the men and women waiting for their champaign glasses to be filled after the dinner that of course was more important to them than hearing the words of the Prime Minister of the largest European State with a Muslim majority and one of the most strategic areas on the face of the earth), Tayyip Erdogan begins to respond to the barrage of filth poured out by Peres.

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PulseMedia This first-hand field report and analysis comes direct from the tireless UK physicians Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang in Gaza, 30 January 2009. Please consider supporting their indispensable medical efforts through any designated charities or through MAP. Forthcoming dispatches will be published here as received; here is the first which provides background to the situation as well as important medical and political details often directly garnered on the situation at hand. The wounds of Gaza are deep. Dr Ghassan describes it as multi-layered. Are we talking about the Khan Younis massacre of 5,000 in 1956 or the execution of 35,000 prisoners of war by Israel in 1967? Yet more wounds of the First Intifada, when civil disobedience by an occupied people against the occupiers resulted in massive wounded and hundreds dead? We also cannot discount the 5,420 wounded in southern Gaza alone since 2000. Hence what we are referring to below are only that of the invasion as of 27 December 2008.

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Khalid Amayreh

It is really difficult to take seriously those who think that the new American envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, has a real chance of getting Israel, the Nazi-like entity, to end its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and therefore achieve a just and lasting peace in this tortured part of the world.

True, Mitchell succeeded in resolving the 800-year-old conflict in Northern Ireland. However, with Israel in tight control of the American Congress, media and public discourse, it is unlikely that Mitchell will be able to do much in terms of pressuring the apartheid state to take a strategic decision to end its 40-year-old colonialist occupation of Palestinian territories. The factors militating against Mitchell’s mission are numerous and overwhelming.

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Truth is Beauty

As I observe the vilification of Bishop Williamson occurring in the Catholic blogosphere, I can’t help but recall the gospel account of the crucifixion of Christ Himself. For with the exception of the Blessed Mother and St. John, the rest of His apostles had abandoned Him, quaking in their boots “for fear of the Jews” (John 19:38).

Fast forward 20 centuries and something eerily similar seems to be happening again. Only this time, the person being abandoned and crucified is Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of St. Pius X. And what was his crime, pray tell? It seems His Excellency has a penchant for speaking the truth to power, something Our Lord Himself was not afraid to do, including the following flamer - right to the Pharisees’ faces (John 8:44):

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it.

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Walter Brasch

My wife is a smoker. Except for one year when she quit, she's been a smoker since she was about 18. But she's cut back, from as many as three packs a day to just three cigarettes. And, she now smokes outside the house.

At various times, she was asked to show an ID. When in her 20s she saw it as an annoyance. By her 30s and 40s, it was a compliment. Now it's just downright annoying.

The law restricts persons under 18 years of age from buying or smoking cigarettes. My wife understands why she must be "carded."

Yesterday she was carded when she wanted to buy two lighters. The sweet lady at the grocery checkout counter said that the chain store is carding everyone who buys lighters. Something about a juvenile who used a lighter and accidentally set his house on fire.

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Khalid Amayreh

[URUKNET] Muzzling Freedom of Expression in Palestine.

When the Beirut-based Al-Quds satellite television interviewed me last week on the recent genocidal Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip, it never occurred to me that the few sound bites I uttered would land me in a slimy prison cell at the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Preventive Security Apparatus (PSA) in Hebron.

During that interview, I was asked why the American-backed regime in Ramallah was not allowing large protests in solidarity with the Gaza Strip. I answered that the PA didn't want things to get out of control and that it didn't wish to antagonize Israel.

Interestingly, Israel itself had allowed a massive demonstration against the war on Gaza to take place in the Israeli Arab town of Sakhnin where as many as 150,000 people, including some Jewish peace activists, took to the streets to protest the nauseating killings and bombings of civilian targets all over the coastal enclave.

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Dr. Elias Akleh

Commenting on the latest Israeli one-directional onslaught against the Palestinians of Gaza Strip, the Israeli 10th TV channel has disclosed that the Israeli genocidal forces had used half of its air force and had launched at least 2500 air raids against Gaza Strip. The television military correspondent stated that the Israeli warplanes had dropped more than a thousand tons of explosives, including white phosphorous and DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) bombs, during three weeks on the virtually unarmed densely populated 360 square Kilometers Strip. He added that the shells fired by tanks, artillery, gunboats, and infantry were not included in those fired by the air force.

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Todd Gordon

When other diplomatic allies can’t be found, Israel knows it can count on Canada.

That’s certainly the message it received Monday, when Canada earned the ignominious distinction of being the only country at a United Nations human rights council in Geneva to vote against a motion condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza – an attack that, as of January 15, has killed nearly 1,000 people (292 of them children), injured more than 4,250 and caused 90,000 Gazans to flee their homes. Thirteen countries, mostly from Europe, abstained, while the U.S. doesn’t sit on the body. The non-binding motion calls for an investigation into human rights violations by the Israeli army.

Canada’s representative at the council, Marius Grinius, criticized the motion for failing to acknowledge that the invasion was the result of rockets fired by Hamas into Israel. Never mind that the rockets actually came after several Israeli incursions into Gaza that left dozens dead during and immediately following five months of ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, or that Israel has imposed a suffocating blockade on Gaza for the last eighteen months, cutting off desperately-needed humanitarian relief to the million and a half people living in the open air prison, or that Israel’s invasion of Gaza has done far more damage to civilians and critical infrastructure than Hamas’s rockets could ever do in Israel. It’s all the fault of Hamas.

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