Flemming Trondsen

Dr. Mads Gilbert (left) during one of the many operations at
the Shifa hospital in Gaza, Palestine. Photo: ScanPix.

The Israelis won’t permit the convoy to leave Gaza.

The Norwegian doctors Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert had planned on leaving Gaza today, and just before 1 o’clock (pm) Norwac’s co-ordinator, John Eivind Jensen, informed that everything was going as planned.

The doctors had intended to take part in a convoy that were to take 10–15 patients out of Gaza City, but this convoy now has been prevented from leaving the area.

-The Israelis won’t let the convoy pass, Dr. Gilbert says to Aftenposten.no.

The convoy consists of 10-15 ambulances, and several of the wounded need to be transported elsewhere for treatment.

-Now we’ve had to take the people most seriously wounded out of the ambulances and back into the intensive care unit again, Gilbert says despairingly.

He thinks the reason for stopping the convoy could be that the Israelis now are bombing the area where it would have to pass through on its way to Egypt.

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Saree Makdisi

Israel has killed and wounded almost four thousand men, women and children so far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the ruins of their homes. As I write these words, news is breaking that Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel’s relentless barrage—and its deliberately terrorizing “warning” leaflets and prerecorded phone calls—had already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same—“flee, flee for your lives!”). Mosques, schools, houses, apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside.

All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a year. What happened to “an eye for an eye?”

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Gilad Atzmon

"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you.” ~Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” ~Deuteronomy 7:1-2,

"…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you…” ~Deuteronomy 20:16

There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.

As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted momentarily in Palestine by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF is using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to ‘destroy’ the Palestinians while showing ‘no mercy’ whatsoever.

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Jalal Alavi

The 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution is nearing. The revolution of 1979 was not only an act against the US domination of Iranian politics, which began with the US-British coup of 1953 against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, but also an act that was supposed to place Iran amongst the countries that made the transition to electoral democracy [1] as part of what the late Samuel Huntington and others have called the “third wave” of democratization.

Thirty years later, it seems fair to say that neither of the above objectives has been achieved to the satisfaction of the majority population in Iran, of course, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, as of the time of the revolution, may be said to be actor-based in nature: those who promised a more sovereign Iran and a more open society decided to establish a manifestly anti-Western theocracy instead, which eventually engendered not only a more interventionist Iran policy on the part of the United States and other Western powers, but also a clerical regime that turned out to be more reactionary than the secular autocracy it replaced.

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