Uncategorized

NOVANEWS    Yediot's Barnea: Netanyahu asks Wiesel to intervene with Obama Didi Remez | April 4, 2010 at 09:01 | Categories: Diplomacy | URL: http://wp.me/pHlQV-sh Say something to Obama Nahum Barnea, Yediot, April 4 2010 [page 2 with front-page teaser] Wiesel and Obama Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that he is in deep trouble at the White House. This weekend he made an interesting effort to find ways into Barack Obama's heart. The author Elie Wiesel, in Israel for the holiday, received a call from the Prime Minister's Office asking that he meet urgently with Netanyahu. On Friday afternoon Wiesel arrived at Netanyahu's Ceasarea home. Obama venerates Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate. He sees in him a role model for the struggle for human rights. When Ob...

NOVANEWS Israeli Military Offers “Cartoon” Theories to Explain Fatal Shooting of Bi’lin Protester, and Declines to Investigate Bassem Abu Rahmeh at a Bi'lin Demonstration  Ha’aretz reports that  a year after Bassem Abu Rahmeh was fatally shot in the chest by a tear gas grenade as he stood unarmed at the weekly protest against the Wall in the West Bank village of Bi’lin,  the military prosecution has decided that it would not investigate his death.  Although ballistic experts had concluded that the grenade was fired directly at Abu Rahmeh based on footage of the shooting from three separate video cameras, the military found no basis to this claim, and offered two possible explanations:  A. The injured man was standing on an elevated spot, and intersected the firing line of the grenade or...

NOVANEWS How the US military kills civilians in Afghanistan The recent complete comments by General Stanley McChrystal to American troops in Afghanistan. Imagine if, say, an Iranian general said this to his men. Sure, we kill countless innocents but they know it’s for their own good. The moral bankruptcy of the mission in Afghanistan: We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn’t mean I’m...

NOVANEWS When a dictator asks the oppressed to trust him (welcome to Sri Lanka) Posted: 02 Apr 2010 08:13 PM PDT This is about as convincing as Israel’s racist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman telling the people of Gaza that he loves them and they should embrace the Jewish state (oh wait, he has said the latter): Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Thursday promised voters in the minority Tamil city of Jaffna a role in solving their own problems in his second visit since the end of a three-decade civil war in May. Voters in Jaffna and other Tamil areas roundly rejected Rajapaksa, who led Sri Lanka’s victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and their 25-year-separatist war, at a presidential poll in January at which he secured a second six-year term. The president’s Unite...

NOVANEWS The Catholic Church finds a link between the poor Pope and Jew hatred Anti-Semitism is a hatred that tars all Jews for the actions of a few, a virulent strain of irrational ideology. There is utterly no comparison between anti-Semitism and reasonably demanding that the Catholic Church, an organisation that has spent decades hiding child rapists and torturers, finally takes responsibility for its actions. The Pope is complicit: A Jewish group and victims of Catholic clergy abuse have expressed alarm over a Vatican official who they said hurled a provocative insult by equating the church paedophilia scandal with anti-Semitism. In a Good Friday service, Vatican preacher Father Raniero Cantalamessa read aloud a letter from a “Jewish friend” who wrote that the “collective blame” invol...

NOVANEWS  Vignettes from Gaza show us a hidden world Posted: 03 Apr 2010 06:30 AM PDT Back in January my American friend Nitin Sawhney – writer, activist and human rights worker – entered Gaza and wrote about his impressions. Now comes the promo for the upcoming film: A brief 2-minute trailer showing a vignette of scenes from the upcoming documentary film called “Strawberries, Roosters and the Chocolate Seas” by Nitin Sawhney and Roger Hill. All video footage was shot in January 2010. The trailer uses an ambient soundtrack recorded on-location in Gaza, composed of waves crushing along the seaside with a call for prayers in the background, as an intentional aesthetic. The tranquil soundscape juxtaposes with the visible signs of destruction and the invisible tensions in the air, one year af...

NOVANEWS A Palestinian state “around 2011″ Posted: 03 Apr 2010 08:24 AM PDT Here’s the Palestinian “vision”, courtesy of Western funding and largess. Impossible to achieve? No. A provisional Palestinian “state” could be called today. The question is what it will look like, what happens to the Jewish settlers and how will Israel react. Right now, the thought of a viable Palestinian state seems close to impossible: Next year, “the birth of a Palestinian state will be celebrated as a day of joy by the entire community of nations,” says Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in an exclusive interview to Haaretz. Relaying Passover greetings to the Jewish community, Fayyad hopes Israelis will also participate in the celebrations for the birth of a new state. “The time for this baby t...

NOVANEWS Originally published on EI: "Is it true that the Jews want to retake this country?" asked a Palestinian farmer close to the turn of the 20th century, according to the notes of Albert Antebi, an official of the Jewish Colonial Association. They did and do. Palestinian peasants were the first to feel the effects of Zionist encroachment. And today, the countryside and its villages are where the struggle against territorial maximalism continues, dunum by dunum, olive orchard by olive orchard. This Palestinian Life, a 28-minute documentary, surveys rural resistance in occupied Palestine: in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, in the Jordan Valley, and in the south Hebron hills. The film was made by Egyptian-German journalist Philip Rizk, who lived in Palestine from 2004 to 2007, tal...

NOVANEWS While Israel bombs Gaza and injures a number of Palestinian children, The Cable reports on the latest theatre performance between Israel and Washington: The Obama administration’s list of “actions” it wants to see from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is open to negotiation, not a hard list of demands as many believe, according to one Obama administration official close to the discussions. The list was delivered to Netanyahu during his two-plus hours of meetings with President Obama last week. There has been a host of reporting about what the actions were that Obama sought from Netanyahu, none of it confirmed by a White House that sees it as crucial to keep the discussions private after the U.S.-Israel dispute over East Jerusalem construction blew up in a very public way...

NOVANEWS Help overthrow Saddam, love Iran and thrive in today’s Iraq The ever-widening influence of Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi.