Links to cables between the U.S. and various countries:

TURKEY

RWANDA

INDONESIA

CHINA

LIBYA

TAIWAN

FRANCE

AFGHANISTAN

IRAN

VENEZUELA

RUSSIA

ISRAEL

[via:reinventionoftheprintingpress]

WATCH: Disappearance, then discovery leads to ‘honor killing’ outrage

CNN reports on Ayah Baradiyya, a young Palestinian women in the West Bank, murdered by her uncle and whose killing has incited a call to the Palestinian Authority to change the penal code that barely punishes those who slaughter for “honor.”

Humiliating Israeli Video Condemned

A video of a male Israeli soldier bellydancing around a bound and blindfolded female prisoner has been received with disgust among Palestinians and in the Middle East.

The video provoked an angry response from the Palestinians on Tuesday.

The clip, which came to light after it was screened on Israel’s private Channel 10 television late on Monday, shows a soldier gyrating to rhythmic drumbeat of an Arabic track as the woman, who is wearing a headscarf, huddles against a wall, her hands bound in front of her and her eyes bound with a white cloth.

The soldier, who is wearing sunglasses and smiling broadly, repeatedly brushes up close to the woman who has a Hebrew speech bubble coming out of her mouth reading “Allahu Akbar” - Arabic for  “God is greatest”.

Crudely captioned “Israeli soldier catch Arab terrorist (he dance on her) funny”, the clip lasts just over a minute.

The video was immediately condemned by the Palestinian Authority (PA) as “deeply offensive to the dignity of women”.

“This is a disgusting illustration of the sick mentality of the occupier. This is not an isolated incident,” a statement from the office of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, said.

[via:newsflick]

(Source: newsflick)

Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs Alon Ben-Meir’s balanced piece on two fundamental issues that condition Israeli-Palestinian talks cuts through the process noise and supposed dramas between Netanyahu and Obama being echoed back and forth between US and Israeli media and zeroes in a bottom line, if not the bottom line. Ben-Meir writes:

The Palestinians, including Hamas, must accept the fact that the prospect of establishing a state of their own is intertwined with Israel’s national security. Meanwhile, Israel must drop the illusion that it can insure its national security while maintaining even a semblance of the occupation. Neither side can realize what they want unless they accept this basic bitter-sweet reality.

+ here

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist and author, specializing in Jewish-related issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was invited to give a speech at the University of Waterloo in which a Jewish girl threw the Holocaust card to silence criticisms of the Israeli government’s crimes against the Palestinian people. 

And here is what Dr. Finkelstein had to say in response.

[via:bradicalmang]

Women Celebrate Ramadan 2010

A series of images of women and girls celebrating Ramadan, Islam’s holiest month.

1. Muslim girls offer prayers before having their Iftar (fast-breaking) meal during the holy month of Ramadan at a madrasa on the outskirts of Jammu on August 21, 2010. (REUTERS/Mukesh Gupta)
2. Indonesian women pray during the first night of Ramadan in Jakarta on August 10, 2010. (ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images)
3. With the Dome of the Rock Mosque seen in the background, a Palestinian Muslim worshiper prays during the third Friday prayers of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday, Aug. 27, 2010. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
4. A Palestinian woman’s shadow is seen on a wall as she waits while attempting to cross the Kalandia checkpoint in order to go pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the third Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday, Aug. 27, 2010. Israel loosened some restrictions on Palestinian movement between the West Bank and Israel during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. (AP Photo/Tara Todras-Whitehill)
5. A Palestinian Muslim worshiper walks in an alley of Jerusalem’s Old City, on her way to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque on the third Friday of Ramadan on Aug. 27, 2010. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

[source]

Is Israel an Apartheid State?

An interesting segment from The Real News that features an Israeli human rights lawyer who shows how their are two different applications of justice and law - one for Israeli Jews and one for Palestinians. He doesn’t go so far has saying that Israel is an apartheid system, but that indeed apartheid is being practiced in the West Bank.

[via:palestinetoday]

In what is appeared to be a highly dubious singling out of the word “Palestinian” in the content filter by the social media leader, Facebook had been blocking the creation of a Page by Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet. Though the issue was resolved and PPRN was finally allowed to create their Page, it does beg the question how did “Palestinian” the word get placed in the content filter in the first place? “Afghan Refugee ResearchNet,” “DR Congo Refugee ReserachNet,” and “Israeli Refugee ResearchNet” appeared to pass muster, but not “al-Qaida Refugee ResearchNet” and “Nazi Refugee ResearchNet.” As the blog noted:

It does seem a bit odd, however, that a population of up to 12 million people, receiving more than a billion dollars in international aid each year, recognized by the UN, and enjoying a degree of formal diplomatic recognition from the United States—is placed in the same filtered category as Nazis and al-Qaida.

Read the full story here.

We’ve been posting more and more stuff from Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald because, well, he’s a national treasure. How he exposes political hypocrisy is like John Stewart for the non-cable-watching set. In his column today, Greenwald takes on the grossly abused “terrorist” label and holds the wide-angle historic lens to Irgun Zvai Leumi and how Israeli politician Tzipi Livni has attempted to revise history.

Greenwald recounts:

I happened to come across a typical though highly illustrative example of this manipulation when reading this NYT interview yesterday with Israeli politician Tzipi Livni.  After railing against the Terrorists in Gaza, Livni said this:

NYT: Your parents were among the country’s founders.

Livni:  They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

If any group meets the definition of “terrorism,” the Irgun does.  In July, 1946, the group (led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) notoriously bombed the King David Hotel, which housed British government offices, killing 91 people (Irgun claimed they warned of the bombing in advance, a claim denied by many British officials).  Israel and its defenders love to point to the naming of a public square after a Terrorist by the Palestinian Authority, while ignoring the fact that the current Israeli Prime Minister, in 2006, actually led a celebration of the King David Hotel bombing with an official commemorative ceremony and plaque outside the building.  Irgun also perpetrated numerous armed attacks on civilian structures, train stations, government buildings, and bridges.

[…]

It was once commonly accepted that Irgun members were Terrorists.  But that was then and this is now.  Bombings, stealing and killing in pursuit of statehood by some groups is Terrorism and by other groups it is “freedom fighting.”  And thus does Israel, which justifies the most extreme brutality and violence based on the pure evil of Terrorism, celebrate those acts as ”freedom fighting” when done by its own side.  This would be all tolerable if it were merely about rhetorical inconsistencies.

Livni’s revisionism is just one recent example of how political ideology aims to recast history, however heinous, to serve political aims. Of course, it’s not the exclusive tactic of the Israeli government. Americans have quite literally witnessed this with the revisions to Texas’ history text books.

The consequences are have short-term and long-term affects. Policy based on a loosely defined term like “terrorist” has manifested in Obama’s “assassination program,” which shreds the Constitution with its very existence. And in the long-term, as in the case with Texas’ text books, generations are schooled in a false history that dares them to make future socio-political mistakes without the corrective lessons that a “politically untainted” history provides. Imagine the millions of Chinese student who have no idea what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or German children who have been shielded from the history of the Holocaust?

This sounds outrageous because it is. Yesterday’s terrorists cannot be rehabilitated as “freedom fighters” without treading a dangerous path that isn’t unlike the sin of a Holocaust-denier.