Sabbah Report headlines for American holidays
Prominent Jewish-American professor says Gaza rockets were ‘symbolic resistance’ to Israeli siege.
LONDON – Prominent Jewish-American Professor Norman Finkelstein accused Israel of perpetrating "war crimes" in Gaza through its ongoing siege of the Strip and its war at the turn of the year.
His accusation came within an international conference titled, "UNRWA and Future of Palestinian Refugees", organized in London Wednesday.
Finkelstein said the causes and effects of the war on Gaza are now coming to light, both in the Goldstone Report and in the recent arrest warrant issued by the UK for Tzipi Livni, who stated that she was "proud of everything she had done in Gaza".
Briefly assessing the history to the siege, Finkelstein noted that the ceasefire that was agreed between Israel and Hamas June 2008 was broken by Israel, not Hamas: whilst Hamas stopped its rocket attacks, Israel did not lift its illegal blockade on Gaza and launched a night raid on Gaza, whilst the eyes of the worlds were watching 4th November 2008 US elections.
Gaza Freedom March is Determined to Break the Siege
Citing escalating tensions on the Gaza-Egypt border, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry informed us on December 20 that the Rafah border will be closed over the coming weeks, into January. We responded that there is always tension at the border because of the siege and that if there are any risks, they are risks we are willing to take. We also said that it was too late for over 1,360 delegates coming from over 42 countries to change their plans now.
Although we consider this as a setback, it is something we’ve encountered—and overcome–before. No delegation, large or small, that has entered Gaza over the past 12 months has received a final OK before arriving at the Rafah border. Most delegations were discouraged from even heading out of Cairo to Rafah. Some had their buses stopped on the way. Some have been told outright that they could not go into Gaza. But after public and political pressure, the Egyptian government changed its position and let them pass.
Our efforts and plans will not be altered at this point. We have set out to break the siege of Gaza and to march in Gaza on December 31 against the international blockade. We are continuing the journey.
Israel Admits Stealing Palestinian Organs
Israel Admits Stealing Palestinian Organs
"If such is what they are willing to admit, imagine how much they are concealing," Knesset member Teibi told IOL.
By Khalid Amayreh* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — For the first time, Israel has tacitly admitted stealing Palestinian body parts for transplant in Jewish patients, vindicating accusations leveled by Palestinians and rights groups over the past years.
"We started to harvest corneas…whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family," pathologist Yehuda Hiss, the former head of the Abu Akbar Center, also known as the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine, told Nancy Sheppard-Hughes, now a professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, in a documentary aired by the Israeli Channel Two.
The documentary revealed that in the 1990s, forensic specialists harvested corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
Hiss said his doctors often sought to mask the removal of corneas from bodies.
"We’d glue the eyelid shut. We wouldn’t take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."
Other body parts believed to have been harvested from deceased Palestinians and others included heart arteries, bones and corneal tissues.
"The skins were taken from the bodies and transmitted to Hadasah hospital in West Jerusalem on the request of the Israeli army to be transplanted to wounded soldiers and in case of disaster," said Hiss.
Hiss revealed that in the early 1990s, military surgeons began removing a thin layer of skin from bodies to treat burn victims, which he said was done without family consent.
Hughes reportedly decided to publish the interview, recorded in 2000 as part of her studies at the Israeli forensic institute, after a leading Swedish daily reported in August that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians to trade in their organs.
One Year on Gaza Massacre
(Gaza Massacre: Dec 2008-Jan 2009) A picture shows the body of a Palestinian girl found in the rubble of her destroyed house following an Israeli air strike on a three-storey house belonging to a Hamas member in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitun on January 6, 2009. About 30 people were inside the house when it was destroyed by the air raid, neighbors said. Israeli tanks firing cannons and machine guns and supported by helicopter gunships also moved into the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip before dawn, witnesses said. AFP PHOTO/MOHAMMED ABED (Photo credit should read MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images)
By Khalid Amayreh* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz
The international community’s shaming silence has done nothing to stop the Israeli intentional attempts to kill life in Gaza. (Reuters Photo)
Despite the passage of an entire one year since the cruel Israeli onslaught against the people of the Gaza Strip, the international community has done very little to remedy the effects and aftereffects of the Nazi-like Israeli campaign.Under the rubric of fighting Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim liberation movement, the Israeli army on December 27, 2008, rained bombs, missiles, white phosphorus, and other lethal weapons of death down on the civilian population of Gaza.
The result was more than 1400 Palestinians casualties of mostly innocent civilians, including more than 350 dead children, and more than 5,000 maimed and injured ones.
Moreover, the sustained bombing, which lasted for 21 days, destroyed the bulk of the civilian infrastructure throughout the coastal territory, leaving more than 40,000 homes totally or partially destroyed.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of public buildings, such as mosques and other public facilities were bombed and leveled to the ground.
By Nancy Murray | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz
For most Americans, the Gaza Strip is, at best, unknown territory. At worst, it is a hostile land whose "terrorist infrastructure" must be dismantled, no matter what the cost to its million and a half residents.
The Gaza I have been visiting for the past twenty-one years bears little relation to the dehumanizing imagery to which it has been reduced by the mainstream media. The Gaza I know is home to friends and strangers who are as welcoming and humane as they are resilient and determined to achieve their freedom. They have maintained their humanity despite enduring a brutal forty-two-year-old Israeli occupation that has cost them the destruction of their homes, land, economy and future and the loss of more than 4,000 lives since the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Israel admits theft of Palestinian organs
Finally, the Swedish journalist report (Donald Bostrom) was confirmed by the criminal state of Israel.
Watch the first minute of this news bulletin from Aljazeera, which was aired little while ago:
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epNlRAEXUyI
Bended Knees: Zionist Power in American Politics
By James Petras* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz
"Obama want to see a stop to settlements: Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions". Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, May 2009
"What the prime minister has offered in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements…..is unprecedented, there has never been a precondition, it’s always been an issue within negotiations." Hillary Clinton, BBC, November 1, 2009 (my emphasis)
"The US administration understands what we have always said … that the real obstacle to negotiations is the Palestinians (calling for a freeze on settlements)". Israeli Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz, November 1, 2009 (my addition).
"America, stop sucking up to Israel!" Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist, Haaretz, November 1, 2009.
"US Zionists are sticking it to America, 24/7", Anonymous Staff Official, Washington D. C., October 31, 2009.
Introduction:
The discussion of Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US political system revolves around several essential issues, including:
1) The claims by the ZPC that it represents Jewish opinion and values as well as its authority to speak for the interests of the American people.
2) Measuring the power of the ZPC and determining its influence over policy, appointments and political institutions.
3) The question of whether the ZPC is a legitimate part of the US political system, another lobby, or something very different, an unregistered agent of a foreign power (Israel).
4) The scope and depth of the ZPC influence in US politics beyond the focus on its "lobbying" in Washington on a "single issue".
5) The organizational weapons and techniques utilized by the ZPC to maximize influence and deny voice and influence to critics of Israel and itself.
6) The similarities of the organizational linkages of the Israel-Zionist relationship to the Russian – Stalinist Communist Parties of the 1930′s.Method: Public Records, Ethnic Neutral Sources and Citations
The case against the Zionist Power Configuration is based on the open record of publications, speeches, articles, interviews and sources available to the general public (and any interested reader). Many facts and data are drawn from Zionist and Israeli sources as well as mainstream publications and writings by critical journalists and analysts.1 We do not privilege the statements by Jews, whether they are critics or supporters of the State of Israel, as most "progressive" writers do. The pursuit of truth is not an "ethnic science", an approach that smacks of Nazi and Zionist racial theories. Indeed, nothing reveals the extreme Zionist power or cultural hegemony over the debate on Israel and American Zionism so much as the constant reliance, reference and citation of the "Jewish" authorship of critical articles, even when publications by non-Jews are better documented, of earlier publication, and better argued.
Haya and Lama Hamdan killed by an Israeli missile.
Haya Hamdan finally put to rest (probably not in the way her parents envisioned).
Little boy, Yahya Hayek, under rubbles. Our U.S. government recently supplied Israel with a fresh supply of heavy-duty missiles called bunker busters. It seems the Bush administration wanted to assist Israel in the humane and swift killing of Palestinian children without prolonging their pain.
Gaza – This week marks one year since Israel began its attack on the Gaza Strip: a year since phosphorus bombs, dime bombs and other weapons of death and destruction were unleashed on a defenseless civilian population. A year since the people of the world demanded that Israel end its attack on Gaza.
In this Israeli war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, many of our civilians were massacred by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children. Another 5380 Palestinians were injured. We, the 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from our homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling, deadly hermetic Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment described by John Dugard,the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as "a prelude to genocide."
