[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 05 Aug 2006 - Part two]

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The Case for Boycotting Israel Boycott Now! VIRGINIA TILLEY It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel. Good cause for a boycott has, of course, been in place for decades, as a raft of initiatives already attests. But Israel's war crimes are now so shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so helpless, and the international community's need to contain Israel's behavior so urg! ent and compelling, that the time for global action has matured. A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel's aggressive acts and crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25480 Ground Rules Relevant to the Middle East + Statement by Leading Intellectuals on Palestine and Lebanon Mona Baker First: The Ground Rules Rule # 1: In the Middle East, it is always the Arabs that attack first, and it's always Israel who defends itself. This is called "retaliation". Rule # 2: The Arabs, whether Palestinians or Lebanese, are not allowed to kill Israelis. This is called "terrorism". Rule # 3: Israel has the right to kill Arab civilians; this is called "self-defense", or these days "collateral! damage". Rule # 4: When Israel kills too many civilians, the Western world calls for restraint. This is called the "reaction of the international community". Rule # 5: Palestinians and Lebanese do not have the right to capture Israeli military, not even a limited number, not even 1 or 2. Rule # 6: Israel has the right to capture as many Palestinians as they want (Palestinians: around 10000 to date, 300 of which are children, Lebanese: 1000s to date, being held without trial). There is no limit; there is no need for proof of guilt or trial. All that is needed is the magic word: "terrorism"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25479 Israel using US-supplied depleted uranium in Lebanon Written by Israeli Committee for a Middle East Free from Atomic, Biological & Chemical Weapons The government of Israel has recently purchased from the United States bunker-busting bombs (GBU-28), for use in its war in Lebanon. These bombs contain depleted uranium - a carcinogenic substance that spreads in the form of a toxic and radioactive dust, which enters the lungs and bones and is especially harmful to babies and young children. We call on the govern! ment of Israel not to make use of these bombs. This call is of special significance on 6 August, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25473 Are you listening, Joe Biden? Les Gelb? Robert Dreyfuss The Post on line is running a Q&A in regard to the proposition that Iraq ought to be partitioned, divided into (at least) three ethnic and sectarian enclaves. This dumb idea has been put forward by people such as Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, Senator Joe Biden, and Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat who advises the Kurds... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25478 The Yoke of Zion by Israel Shamir Israel Shamir A small band of determined warriors takes on and fights off the mightiest army of the region: this is the stuff history is made of. Thermopylae, move over, Bint Jbeil is coming in! Bishop Philip of Antioch compared the levelling of this small Lebanese town with the destruction of Stalingrad, but these cities are also comparable by courage of their defenders. Seldom is a generation able to witness such a shining example of valour: for three long weeks a handful of He! zbollah warriors – two thousand by the most optimistic count – fought to standstill ten, twenty, thirty times more numerous Israeli troops. Forty years ago, Israelis defeated three armies in one week, but now the invader’s charm has worn off, or it has passed over to the vanquished. In today’s somewhat feminine victim-centred narrative, suffering attracts more attention than masculine gallantry... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25477 More children killed in Rafah Report, PCHR The victims of war crimes perpetrated by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) for the third consecutive day in Rafah has increased to 16 killed, including 10 civilians (four of them children). One of the victims was a three-day-old infant girl who fell her mother's arm as the latter was fleeing from IOF. Two other children victims were brothers. They were killed and their mother and brother were seriously injured when they were trying to flee their house. The number of injure! d is up to 39, including 13 children and one woman. All were injured by shrapnel and burns, many of them were injured seriously. In the pre-dawn hours of Friday, 4 August 2006, IOF planes bombed two civilian houses in Gaza, destroying them completely. In both incidents, the house owners received calls to their mobile telephones from Israeli intelligence telling them to evacuate the house, which will be bombarded. The warning preceded the bombardment by no more than 45 minutes... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25481 Israeli army arrests Palestinian parliament speaker Dweik Xinhua An Israeli army force stormed shortly before midnight on Saturday the house of Aziz Dweik, speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), in the West Bank city of Ramallah and arrested him. Palestinian eyewitnesses and security sources reported that the Israeli army force raided Dweik's house in al-Masayef neighborhood in Ramallah, and took him from home to an Israeli army base outside the city. The security sources in Ramallah said that th! e Israeli army force detained Dweik and conveyed him to a nearby Israeli army headquarters in the outskirts of Ramallah for questioning. Residents in the area said that the Israeli army backed by jeeps and armored vehicles besieged the house of Dweik in the neighborhood and asked him to come out raising his hands and hand himself over to the soldiers... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25482 Palestinians hang Nasrullah’s photo next to those of Arafat, Saddam, and Shaikh Yassin Aljazeerah.info The common denominator among the leaders in the headline is that all fought back against Israeli missiles with those of their own. The late President Yasser Arafat died of mysterious causes after fighting against the occupation for more than 40 years. The spiritual leader of Hamas, the late Shaikh Ahmed Yassin, who Israeli forces assassinated by air while he sat in his wheel chair in front of a Gaza City mosque,! sent them homemade Qassam projectiles which still rain from the Gaza Strip onto the south... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25484 Gays flee Iraq as Shia death squads find a new target Jennifer Copestake, The Observer ...There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country (...) Eleven-year-old Ameer Hasoon al-Hasani was kidnapped by policemen from the f! ront of his house last month. He was known in his district to have been forced into prostitution. His father Hassan told me he searched for his son for three days after his abduction, then found him, shot in the head. A copy of the death certificate confirms the cause of death... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25485 "Kill All Military Age Men!" America's Heroes on Trial GARY LEUPP ...Recently acquiring more glory in Iraq, Steele has boasted of his unit's death count. Last November he declared, "We are absolutely giving the enemy the maximum opportunity to die for his country." This piece of petty bravado indicates that the colonel at least recognizes that the Iraqis he faces are indeed men fighting for their country, against an invader. What to do with these patriots, but to kill them? Recall that four U.S. soldie! rs have recently been charged with murdering three Iraqi civilians. It happens that they were all under the Col. Steele's command, and Steele has been reprimanded in connection with the incident. More than that, he is under investigation for issuing an order to his men during "Operation Iron Triangle" in Samarra on May 9 to "kill all military age males." His men, as part of their defense, are claiming he did... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25487 WAR NEWS FOR SATURDAY, AUGUST 05, 2006 Today in Iraq On Friday, gunmen shot dead a bodyguard of a senior Justice Ministry official in western Baghdad. Nine bodies, all apparently killed, were recovered in five predominantly Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad on Saturday. Five of the bodies were found in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Baladiyat. A police officer was killed Saturday in the predominantly Sunni area of Adhamiya in northern Baghdad. Two people were killed and four wounded Friday when three mortar sh! ells exploded in a religiously mixed suburb near Baghdad... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25474 Extraordinary Precision Ramzy Baroud A SKY News newscaster, interviewing British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett on Sunday, July 30 demanded an answer to this paraphrased question: if indeed Israel had precise intelligence that a Hezbollah operative was present in the village of Qana, in South Lebanon, how could it possibly fail to realise that the area was also crowded with civilians? The question was prompted by Beckett’s insistence that while Israeli attacks that victimise uncountable civilians — like that ! in Qana which killed scores, mostly children — were "appalling", they resulted from tactical errors, and were never deliberate. In fact, she referred to the "apparent deliberate targeting" --as described by UN secretary Kofi Annan — of the UN peacekeepers compound in South Lebanon and the killing of four unarmed observers, as a "mistake."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25486 www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English.   You receive this newsletter because you subscribed it. If you think it was an abuse, or simply if you don't want to receive it any more, click here to unsubscribe from the newsletter.