BATTLE OF ALGIERS

2 hr 2 min

POLICE ROPE IN RAMSI OFFICERS TO OPPRESS SOGAVARE

Date: 10 August 2007

Auckland 6am; Police in the Solomon Islands are warning locals in Honiara they'll face the full brunt of the law if they cause trouble today.

It's D-Day for prime minister Manasseh Sogavare as a vote of no confidence is tabled against him in Parliament.

Police Commissioner Jahir Khan says he has 400 men on duty ready to quell any uprising. (listen)

http://www.niufm.com/site_resources/library/News/Lito/A0000010_aug1007/jahir..................12pm..................1087.mp3

Towards a Geography of Peace: Whither Gaza?

Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include, among others, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and his latest, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)


In Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, a man sits next to a wall that reads in Arabic, "No to internal fighting. Yes to fighting the occupation." 16 June 2007. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

The Gaza Strip is a little bit more than two percent of Palestine. This small detail is never mentioned whenever the Strip is in the news nor has it been mentioned in the present Western media coverage of the dramatic events unfolding in Gaza in the last few weeks. Indeed it is such a small part of the country that it never existed as a separate region in the past. Gaza’s history before the Zionization of Palestine was not unique and it was always connected administratively and politically to the rest of Palestine. It was until 1948 for all intents and purposes an integral and natural part of the country. As one of Palestine’s principal land and sea gates to the world, it tended to develop a more flexible and cosmopolitan way of life; not dissimilar to other gateways societies in the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era. This location near the sea and on the Via Maris to Egypt and Lebanon brought with it prosperity and stability until this life was disrupted and nearly destroyed by the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

In between 1948 and 1967, Gaza became a huge refugee camp restricted severely by the respective Israeli and Egyptian policies: both states disallowed any movement out of the Strip. Living conditions were already harsh then as the victims of the 1948 Israeli politics of dispossession doubled the number of the inhabitants who lived there for centuries. On the eve of the Israeli occupation in 1967, the catastrophic nature of this enforced demographic transformation was evident all over the Strip. This once pastoral coastal part of southern Palesine became within two decades one of the world's densest areas of habitation; without any adequate economic infrastructure to support it.

The first twenty years of Israeli occupation at least allowed some movement outside an area that was closed off as a war zone in the years 1948 to 1967. Tens of thousand of Palestinians were permitted to join the Israeli labor market as unskilled and underpaid workers. The price Israel demanded for this slavery market was a total surrender of any national struggle or agenda. When this was not complied with -- the 'gift' of laborers' movement was denied and abolished. All these years leading to the Oslo accord in 1993 were marked by an Israeli attempt to construct the Strip as an enclave, which the Peace Camp hoped would be either autonomous or part of Egypt and the Nationalist camp wished to include in the Greater Eretz Israel they dreamed of establishing instead of Palestine.

The Oslo agreement enabled the Israelis to reaffirm the Strip's status as a separate geo-political entity -- not just outside of Palestine as a whole, but also cut apart from the West Bank. Ostensibly, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were under the Palestinian Authority but any human movement between them depended on Israel's good will; a rare Israeli trait and which almost disappeared when Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996. Moreover, Israel held, as it still does today, the water and electricity infrastructure. Since 1993 it used, or rather abused, this possession in order to ensure on the one hand the well-being of the Jewish settler community there and on the other in order to blackmail the Palestinian population into submission and surrender. The people of the Gaza Strip thus vacillated in the last sixty years between being internees, hostages or prisoners in an impossible human space.

It is within this historical context that we should view the violence raging today in Gaza and reject the reference to the events there as a campaign in the 'war against terror,' an instance of Islamic revivalism, a further proof for al-Qadia’s expansionism, a seditious Iranian penetration into this part of the world or another arena in the dreaded Clash of Civilizations (I picked here only few out of many frequent adjectives used in the Western media for describing the present crisis in Gaza). The origins of the mini civil war in Gaza lie elsewhere. The recent history of the Strip, 60 years of dispossession, occupation and imprisonment produced inevitably internal violence such as we are witnessing today as it produced other unpleasant features of life lived under such impossible conditions. In fact, it would be fair to say that the violence, and in particular the internal violence, is far less than one would have expected given the economic and social conditions created by the genocidal Israeli policies in the last six years.

Power struggles among politicians, who enjoy the support of military outfits, is indeed a nasty business that victimizes the society as a whole. Part of what goes on in Gaza is such a struggle between politicians who were democratically elected and those who still find it hard to accept the verdict of the public. But this is hardly the main struggle. What unfolds in Gaza is a battleground between America's and Israel's local proxies -- most of whom are unintentionally such proxies but none the less they dance to Israel's tune -- and those who oppose it. The opposition that now took over Gaza did it alas in a way that one would find very hard to condone or cheer. It is not the Hamas' Palestinian vision that is worrying, but rather the means it has chosen to achieve it that we hope would not be rooted or repeated. To its credit one should openly say that the means used by Hamas are part of an arsenal that enabled it in the past to be the only active force that at least tried to stop the total destruction of Palestine; the way it is used now is less credible and hopefully temporary.


Mana Wahine Toa

But one cannot condemn the means if one does not offer an alternative. Standing idle while the American-Israeli vision of strangling the Strip to death, cleansing half of the West bank from its indigenous population and threatening the rest of the Palestinians -- inside Israel and in the other parts of the West Bank -- with transfer, is not an option. It is tantamount to "decent" people’s silence during the Holocaust.

We should not tire from mentioning the alternative in the 21st century: BDS -- Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions -- as an emergency measure -- far more effective and far less violent -- in opposing the present destruction of Palestine. And at the same time talk openly, convincingly and efficiently, of creating the geography of peace. A geography in which abnormal phenomena such as the imprisonment of small portion of the land would disappear. There will be no more, in the vision we should push forward, a human prison camp called the Gaza strip where some armed inmates are easily pitted against each other by a callous warden. Instead that area would return to be an organic part of an Eastern Mediterranean country that has always offered the best as a meeting point between East and West.

Never before, in the light of the Gaza tragedy, has the twofold strategy of BDS and a one state solution, shined so clearly as the only alternative forward. If any of us are members in Palestine solidarity groups, Arab-Jewish dialogue circles or part of civil society's effort to bring peace and reconciliation to Palestine -- this is a time to put aside all the false strategies of coexistence, road maps and two states solutions. They have been and still are sweet music to the ears of the Israeli demolition team that threatens to destroy what is left of Palestine. Beware especially of Diet Zionists or Cloest Zionists, who recently joined the campaign, in Britain and elsewhere against the BDS effort. Like those enlightened pundits who used liberal organs in the United Kingdom, such as The Guardian, to explain to us at length how dangerous is the proposed academic boycott on Israel. They have never expended so much time, energy or words on the occupation itself as they did in the service of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. UNISON, Britain’s large public service trade union, must not be deterred by this backlash and it should follow these brave academics who endorsed the debate on the boycott, as should Europe as a whole: not only for the sake of Palestine and Israel, but also if it wishes to bring a closure to the Holocaust chapter in its history.

And a final small portion of food for thought. There are quite a few Jewish mothers and wives in the Gaza Strip -- some sources within Gaza say up to 2000 -- married to local Palestinians and parents to their children. There are many more Jewish women who married Palestinians in the Palestine countryside. An act of desegregation that both political elites find difficult to admit, digest or acknowledge. If despite the colonization, occupation, genocidal policies and dispossession such harmonies of love and affection were possible, imagine what could happen if these criminal policies and ideologies would disappear. When the Wall of Apartheid is removed and the electric fences of Zionism dismantled -- Gaza will become once more a symbol of Fernand Braudel's coastal society, able to fuse different cultural horizons and offer a space for new life instead of the war zone it has become in the last sixty years.

http://www.electronicintifada.net

Media release on Voices of Peace

been borrowing his "two cheeks of the same arse" phrase brill way to describe Racist Capitalist Imperialists.

RAM ­ Residents Action Movement
Media release on Voices of Peace
13 July 2007

GEORGE GALLOWAY
British Respect MP & world peace campaigner

'I am delighted to speak in
Auckland against Islamophobia'

"I am delighted to be invited to speak in Auckland against the rising
tide of Islamophobia. Racism against Muslims is the accompanying
factor of George Bush¹s so-called War on Terror," said British Respect
MP & international peace campaigner George Galloway.

Expelled from the British Labour Party for opposing the US war in
Iraq, Mr Galloway shot to world fame in May 2005 when he testified
before the US Senate to reject allegations of taking money from Saddam
Hussein to help Iraq break American trade sanctions. During his Senate
appearance the left-wing British MP turned the tables on pro-war
politicians by charging the administration of US president George Bush
with war crimes in Iraq.

The politically-inspired allegations against Mr Galloway were finally
laid to rest in March 2007 when the London Metropolitan Police and the
British Serious Fraud Office announced that he had no case to answer.

Mr Galloway is speaking at two Voices of Peace meetings in Auckland on
27-28 July hosted by RAM, the Residents Action Movement. These
meetings are open to the public and entry is free. (Meeting details
below.)

"Demonising the peoples of the Middle East who resist Western rule
leads inevitably to demonising their co-religionists who live in the
West," said Mr Galloway. "The result is racism and bitter alienation
among young Muslims, providing the very breeding ground for nihilistic
acts of terrorism which the war is purportedly waged to reduce."

"Islamophobia is also the smokescreen for the failure of US imperial
policy in Iraq and the wider Middle East. It is rising along with the
savage death toll in Iraq ­ of Iraqis themselves and of American and
British troops."

"We will not end this new racism unless we end the wars of aggression
that breathe life into it. That¹s the message I will be bringing with
me to New Zealand. And, from what I know of the country, I anticipate
a warm response," concluded Mr Galloway.

Contact RAM organiser Grant Morgan for a photo of George Galloway.
Email grantmorgan@... or call 021 2544 515.

VOICES OF PEACE
AUCKLAND MEETINGS
GEORGE GALLOWAY will be addressing these two meetings:

TOWN MEETING
7.30pm, Saturday 28 July.
Auckland Girls Grammar School Theatre.
16 Howe St (off Karangahape Rd).
The three other speakers are:

* JAVED KHAN, president of Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ.
* PAUL BUCHANAN, international security analyst & director of the
Working Group on Alternative Security Perspectives at the University
of Auckland.
* GRANT MORGAN, organiser of RAM ­ Residents Action Movement.

Limit of 800 seats, so those interested are being advised to get there
early. NO DOOR CHARGE. Donations will be accepted.

UNIVERSITY MEETING
6pm, Friday 27 July.
University of Auckland.
Venue to be confirmed.
The three other speakers are:

* NIBRAS KARDAMAN, young Muslim woman & representative of the
Working Together Group.
* STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE of the campus organising group.
* GRANT MORGAN, organiser of RAM ­ Residents Action Movement.

NO DOOR CHARGE. Donations will be accepted.


Both meetings OPEN TO THE MEDIA.

WORKSHOPS
There will also be Voices of Peace workshops where topics touching on
Islamophobia can be discussed together by Muslims and non-Muslims.
George Galloway will give the introduction.
2-5pm, Sunday 29 July.
Fickling Convention Centre, 546 Mt Albert Rd, Three Kings.
Limit of 250 participants, so those interested are being advised to
get there early.

Children of the dust

John Pilger, The New Statesman

23 May 2007


As the Israeli army attempts to imprison an entire nation, it is the youngest who suffer most. Half of all Palestinians killed in the past six years are children.

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] . . ." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bank rolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".

Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Orga nisation] by using a competing religious alter native", in the words of a former CIA official. Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Pales tinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.

With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today . . ."

On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director . . . The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is . . . an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."

The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".

Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.

More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.

I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."

He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".

Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.

There are honourable exceptions. The kidnap ped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, includ ing the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.

A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions . . . If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."

When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.

John Pilger's latest book, "Freedom Next Time", is published in paperback by Black Swan (£8.99). His first film for cinema, "The War on Democracy", is released on 15 June

:: Article nr. 33122 sent on 24-may-2007 11:43 ECT

Racist pub bans Arabs, Islanders

Racist pub ... Benji Tupou says he was 'belittled' by staff at Scruffy Murphy's

Exclusive by Shoba Rao

May 03, 2007 12:00
Article from: The Daily Telegraph



SECURITY staff at one of Sydney's most popular pubs were ordered to refuse entry to patrons of particular ethnic backgrounds in a racist exclusion policy designed to cut crime.

The owner of Scruffy Murphy's Irish pub in the CBD admitted yesterday he had implemented a policy in 2005 denying entry to patrons of Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander origin.

Malcolm McGuinness told the NSW Equal Opportunity Tribunal the exclusion edict was introduced after police threatened to impose sanctions on his hotel after a series of incidents.

The publican and T&B Security Services director Tibi Brandusoiu are being sued by two would-be patrons of Pacific Islander origin for damages for racial discrimination.

Have you been discriminated against because of your background? Tell us via the feedback form below.

Mr McGuinness said the exclusion policy – introduced in November 2005 and scrapped early last year – was designed to prevent problems "related to gangs" and in "my viewpoint it was not discriminating".

"Once we implemented this policy, assaults were reduced," he said.

Samoan Benji Tupou, 31, of Maroubra, told the tribunal he was twice refused entry to Scruffy Murphy's in 2005 because of his ethnic background.

Mr Tupou alleged that on the first occasion, he was pulled out of a queue by a Polynesian security guard who told him: "Yep, no Islanders."

Five months later he tried again. This time he was approached by a member of the security staff who asked: "What nationality are you?"

When Mr Tupou replied: "I'm Samoan or Niuean", the bouncer replied: "Seriously boys, I don't know how to say this, but you guys can't come in to the hotel."

Asked why, the doorman exclaimed: "No Islanders or Lebanese."

Mr Tupou said he had been humiliated by the refusal. "It was belittling to be treated in this way. I was angry about how I was treated," he said.

Also giving evidence yesterday was Marcellus Cook, a New Zealand Maori, who claimed he was refused entry.

Lawyer David Hillard, representing both men, told the tribunal the hotel had made an "uncontested concession" that it breached the Anti-Discrimination Act by refusing entry to Mr Cook at a time when the exclusion policy was in place.

Bryce Cross, counsel for Scruffy Murphy's, told the tribunal that, in Mr Cook's case only, the hotel conceded breaching the Act.

"We have been consistent in the concession that persons not known to staff of Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander appearance were not allowed in to the hotel," he said.

The hearing continues.