"Consider the effects of all checkpoints. Since September 2000,
they've become "the main (source of) friction (between)
Palestinians and Israeli security forces."

Denying Palestinians Free Movement in the West Bank
This article summarizes an August 2007 B'Tselem report now available in print. It's one of a series of studies it conducts on life in Occupied Palestine to reveal what major media accounts suppress. This one is titled: "Ground to a Halt - Denial of Palestinians' Freedom of Movement in the West Bank."

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I am constantly amazed at the obscure details that politicians will dig up to cast aspersions upon the personal lives of their opponents in order to keep the people from looking at the issues. Lately we are being exposed to the "Preacher Scandal" where each candidate is expected to tell their pastor to just shut up!

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People ask me all the time why I went to occupied Palestine-not just once-but five times since 2005 and why do I care so much about such a small plot of real estate.

I reply, that I went the first time to meet a little boy of Bethlehem who changed my life and to be the Christian delegate amongst the Palestinian and Jewish co-founders of the Olive Trees foundation for Peace [http://www.olivetreesfoundation.org/] an interfaith non-profit dedicated to raising awareness and funds to purchase trees that have been destroyed by The Wall.

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'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

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(Hezbollah) Photo James Hill NYT

"These fools do not learn from their past mistakes. When they withdrew from Lebanon, they continued to occupy the Shebaa Farms and kept our brothers in custody. Had they released them when they left Lebanon, there would not now be a 'prisoner issue' between Lebanon and the enemy. They opened the door for us." – Hassan Nasrallah, January 2004, during a welcome home ceremony for Lebanese and Arab detainees as a result of a Hezbollah-Israel swap.

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The World Trade Organization-the agency and the thinking behind it-must be killed. We are at the point of famine today, because only 13 years ago, in January 1995, the WTO was allowed to come into existence, resulting from ten years of UN GATT talks (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 1984-94, on "reforming" world agriculture for free trade. This culminated a process of drastic takedown of world food production potential, from its prior build-up during the FDR period and after World War II. The inevitable result was today's worldwide food crisis. The WTO was evil from the start. Nations were bullied and threatened into going along with it. Tolerating it today is committing evil.

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In the wake of the April 9-10 Capitol Hill testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker, the Bush Administration, according to senior U.S. intelligence sources, has ordered American forces inside Iraq, to escalate the military campaign against Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Madhi Army. Lyndon LaRouche promptly denounced this action as totally psychotic, and guaranteed to blow up the Iraqi situation, which is already fragile, at best.

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Students Shot While at School [from the WE]

Desert Peace

Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

On Sunday, 27 April, the Israeli “Defense” Forces (a more appropriate appellation would be the Jewish Wehrmacht) murdered a mother and her four children in Beit Hanoun, a northern Gaza suburb. The mother and her kids reportedly were having breakfast when an artillery shell fired from an Israeli Merkava battle-tank hit their home, killing them instantly and mutilating their bodies.

The graphic, blood-splattered images of the mutilated children and their mother raised no eyebrows among Israeli leaders and the Zionist-Jewish public opinion. After all, these Nazi-minded and Nazi-hearted Zionists have been doing this for more than sixty years. And the world seems to be coming to terms with these crimes as a fact of life. This is at least how Israel views world reactions to its crimes against the peoples of the Middle East.

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The Day I Lost My Innocence

When I was nineteen I was stationed in a remote Laotian village on the Mekong River. I was an Irish kid from the Bronx, over twelve thousand miles from home. It had been a twenty-two hour plane ride to get, “in country” and another four excruciating hours strapped to a cloth harness in the perimeter of a cargo plane to get to Nakhon Phenom, a town Bob Hope called, “the armpit of the world.” My first day in town seems surreal now. I remember walking up a dirt road and gaping at a yak being prodded by a toothless woman in a sarong.

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