So the votes are in, and UNESCO has voted to accept Palestine as a full member. I have procured the full voting results, which to my knowledge, have not been made public yet. There were 14 “no” votes, 52 abstentions and 107 “yes” votes (there were also 20 21 Member States absent):
No: Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, United States of America, Vanuatu.
The State Department said Washington will not make a $60-million November payment to UNESCO because of a longstanding U.S. law that prohibits American support for any U.N.-affiliated body that accepts Palestinian membership.
Washington currently is UNESCO's biggest funding source, supplying 22 percent of the agency's budget.
Earlier Monday, the Paris-based UNESCO voted to approve the Palestinian membership bid by a vote of 107 to 14, with 52 abstentions.
France voted for the motion, along with almost all Arab, African, Latin American and Asian nations, including China and India. Israel, the United States, Canada and Germany voted against it. Japan and Britain abstained. A two-thirds vote was required by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's 193 members.
Phase I was long since declared an unqualified success: The settlers gained control of the occupied territories, using their power and their construction projects to thwart any just arrangement. But anyone who thought they would settle for controlling the West Bank should take a look at Phase II of the plan, which is at its height and already a success story.
Now, after the hostile takeover of the West Bank, comes the takeover of the state. Now that their lust for land has been slightly slaked they have turned their attention to much broader areas than their own considerable domain. From now on, Yesha is truly here. From now on, it's not enough for them to head the local government councils in the territories - now they're aiming for seats of power within Israel, so that they can shape its image. After taking the West Bank region of Gush Etzion, now they want the Tel Aviv region of Gush Dan.
As this year’s olive harvest sends Palestinian families across all of historic Palestine out to their olive trees, a new nonviolent resistance group called Refusing to Die In Silence is patrolling the West Bank, protecting harvesters from increased settler violence.
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| Salem Bouazizi, left, said his deceased brother's prize would be dedicated to all Tunisian people |
Five Arab Spring activists, among them a Tunisian fruit seller who set himself to fire sparking revolutions that toppled tyrants, have won Europe's prestigious Sakharov human rights prize.
Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit vendor who died from his burns, won the prize along with Egyptian blogger Asmaa Mahfouz, former Libyan prisoner Ahmed al-Zubair Ahmed al-Sanusi and two Syrians - lawyer Razan Zeitouneh and cartoonist Ali Farzat.
They were recognised by the European parliament for struggling for change in their countries at a ceremony in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday.
"I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values?
I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
What I'm afraid of is with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration - no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over."
(Reuters) - A member of the Saudi royal family has pledged $900,000 to a bounty offered by a prominent cleric to any Palestinian who kidnaps an Israeli soldier, according to comments aired on a private TV station Saturday.
Prince Khaled bin Talal, a brother of Saudi billionnaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, told Daleel television over the phone that he decided to contribute to Awad al-Qarni's bounty after the Saudi cleric received death threats for offering $100,000 to capture an Israeli soldier.
By Alan Hart
For readers who may not be intimately familiar with English terminology, an oxymoron is a figure of speech by which contradictory terms are combined to form an expressive phrase or epithet such as cruel kindness and falsely true. (It’s derived from the Greek word oxymoros meaning pointedly foolish).
For my contribution to the De-legitimizing Israel series, I’m going to confine myself to one question and answer.
The question is: How can you de-legitimize something (in this case the Zionist state) when it is NOT legitimate?
Fifty-five years ago, Israeli Zionist terrorists massacred 49 civilian Palestinians in cold blood in the small, impoverished village of Kafr Qasim, Palestine, adding to the deplorable list of massacres committed by Israel since 1948. The villagers were lined up and shot execution style. What was their "crime"? They unknowingly "violated" a curfew announced and imposed on them only thirty minutes earlier. Israel, the "only democracy in the Middle East."
Huneish Nasr last saw the boss he served for 30 years standing in the ruins of Sirte looking confused as all hell broke loose around them.
"Everything was exploding," said Nasr, Muammar Gaddafi's personal driver, recalling the moments before the deposed dictator was caught last week. "The revolutionaries were coming for us. He wasn't scared, but he didn't seem to know what to do. It was the only time I ever saw him like that."
Read more-The Guardian
Libya's interim government says it will prosecute anyone found responsible for the death of Muammar Gaddafi after his capture, in a retreat from its earlier insistence that the dictator had been killed by crossfire.
The change in position comes after a week of sustained criticism of the Libyan leader's captors, who used their camera phones to chronicle his death. The footage, including images of a wounded Gaddafi being sodomised with what looked like a bayonet, caused widespread revulsion outside the country.
Read more-The Guardian
Bedouin communities face aggressive attacks by the Israeli government while illegal settlements continue to encroach on their land.)
JERUSALEM (IPS) - As Israel moves ahead with a plan to forcibly displace tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank, Mohammad al-Korshan and his family are facing the real prospect of not only losing their home, but their traditional way of life.
“The Bedouins depend on animals. We can’t take care of them in the village or in the city. All the Bedouins work with animals. If we go to the city, they kill us. They kill the Bedouins. After a few more years, you won’t have Bedouins in the area,” said al-Korshan, who lives in a Bedouin encampment with more than ninety other families near the West Bank town Anata, northeast of Jerusalem.
“We want to stay in our homes. If they damage our homes or our tents, we want to build again. We won’t move. Even if they want to kill us, we want to stay. We haven’t any place to go,” he said.
Read more
The BDS National Committee (BNC) has declared a long sought-after victory as Alstom lost the bid for the second phase of the Saudi Haramain Railway project, worth $10 billion US dollars, after pressure from the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, including effective campaigning from the newly launched KARAMA, a European campaign to Keep Alstom Rail And Metro Away.
Sabbah Report
After a shooting attack on an Israeli bus and truck two months ago which killed five civilians and three soldiers, Israeli military officials immediately claimed that a Palestinian resistance group was responsible. But an Israeli military investigation revealing that the attack was carried out by Egyptians, not Palestinians, has been 'embargoed' by the military.
Military spokesperson Avital Leibovitz
British intelligence believes the capture and rendition of two top Libyan rebel commanders, carried out with the involvement of MI6, strengthened al-Qaida and helped groups attacking British forces in Iraq, secret documents reveal.
The papers, discovered in the British ambassador's abandoned residence in Tripoli, raise new and damaging questions over Britain's role in the seizure and torture of key opponents of Muammar Gaddafi's regime.
Barack Obama announced at a White House press conference that all American troops will leave Iraq by the end of December, a decision forced by the final collapse of lengthy talks between the US and the Iraqi government on the issue.
The Iraqi decision is a boost to Iran, which has close ties with many members of the Iraqi government and which had been battling against the establishment of permanent American bases.
Obama attempted to make the most of it by presenting the withdrawal as the fulfilment of one of his election promises.
"Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," he told reporters.
"In a 20 October letter, leading archaeologists speak out against plans to break ground on a museum that they say will disturb an ancient Muslim cemetery in the heart of Jerusalem.
With a dramatic modern design and a central location in the contested city, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance is supposed to bring together people from a variety of viewpoints, religions, and ethnicities. But the project's Jerusalem site is on and adjacent to the ancient Muslim cemetery of Mamilla, located just to the west of the ancient city's walls. Mentioned in 11th century C.E. documents, the cemetery was the resting place for early Muslims as well as Christian crusaders, and was used as a burial ground until the mid-20th century."
Paid advertising by Israel Ministry of Tourism inserted into October issue of British Airways High Life magazine
On a recent flight on easyJet, my colleague David Cronin “almost vomited” when he came across a glossy feature in the in-flight magazine pinkwashing Tel Aviv as a “Liberal and hedonistic” gay-friendly destination.
Aboard a British Airways flight the other day I had a similar experience when I opened up the in-flight magazine High Life to discover a glossy multi-page insert from the Israeli Ministry of Tourism entitled “Israel, The Hidden Gems.”
Philip Weiss
I keep saying that the Israel lobby is a central factor in the making of our foreign policy, and some day journalists are going to have to cover the story-- and the Liam Fox scandal in Britain ups the ante.
Liam Fox was once a rising star in British politics. But the British defense secretary resigned a week back because of his close financial ties to a business lobbyist named Adam Werritty who came and went with Fox on foreign trips and at the ministry, as though he were a government official.
(Reuters) - It all started innocuously enough with a July 13 blog post urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible.
It turns out, with enough momentum and a keen sense of how to use social media, it actually is.
The Occupy movement, decentralized and leaderless, has mobilized thousands of people around the world almost exclusively via the Internet. To a large degree through Twitter, and also with platforms like Facebook and Meetup, crowds have connected and gathered.
By now, Gilad Shalit is back in Israel, while around 1000 Palestinian prisoners will eventually be released from Israeli jails, then scattered to various locations from Jerusalem to Egypt to Syria, where many will live in permanent exile. While some Israelis doubt the wisdom of the prisoner swap, there can be little doubt that the state of Israel has scored a public relations victory in the United States. American coverage of the prisoner exchange has focused almost exclusively on Shalit, his family, and Jewish Israeli society's "bittersweet" reaction to the deal.
The Occupy Wall Street protest against income disparity spread across Western Europe, Asia, the US and Canada today.
Rome's demonstration turned violent, contrasting with peaceful events elsewhere.
Protesters gather near St Paul's Cathedral in London for Saturday's demonstration.
As many as 500 marchers in Rome wielding clubs attacked police, two banks and a supermarket, Sky TG24 reported.
Authorities used tear gas and water cannon.
“Death to Arabs” and “price tag” sprayed on Muslim and Christian graves in Jaffa.
Occupy Wall Street has already won, perhaps not the victory most of its participants want, but a momentous victory nonetheless. It has already altered our political debate, changed the agenda, shifted the discussion in newspapers, on cable TV, and even around the water cooler. And that is wonderful.
Suddenly, the issues of equity, fairness, justice, income distribution, and accountability for the economic cataclysm–issues all but ignored for a generation—are front and center. We have moved beyond the one-dimensional conversation about how much and where to cut the deficit. Questions more central to the social fabric of our nation have returned to the heart of the political debate. By forcing this new discussion, OWS has made most of the other participants in our politics—who either didn’t want to have this conversation or weren’t able to make it happen—look pretty small.
Comment posted on Mondoweiss in regards to land ownership in Palestine:
Phil...someday you must post an essay that EXPLAINS the LAND-OWNERSHIP system of Palestine before 1922 and maybe until 1947.
It’s explained, I believe, by a book by Raja Shehade. The point is that it is not the same as western, or British, or American real property law. Ownership is not limited to PERSONAL, STATE (or VILLAGE). There are also various types or grades of communal lands, for grazing for instance, used by all residents of a village and regarded as their land. there is also land owned by religious “trusts” (waqf land).
Israel pretends that land not PERSONALLY owned is STATE land and that they may usurp it at will. This is probably not true EVEN of actually state land, under international law, but it is especially galling where it conflates various types of non-STATE#, non-Personal ownerships with state-ownership.
I realize that I am almost as blind as all the other Americans-- because our media has done nothing to inform us about conditions. Our society has ignored these conditions by saying, Well it's a tough neighborhood, or, They're Arabs. Below is a video about the Arabs in that tough neighborhood. It is one of several videos I'll be posting in days to come.
Turks say no to Israeli carpets 
Vogue Nov 2011. The note emphasises that the clothes, 'throughout' are her own...
Foreign Policy
With protesters occupying Wall Street and European voters deciding on whether to support the failing peripheral states, Foreign Policy went back to its two favorite economic and political prognosticators -- Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer -- for another spirited debate on what the coming months hold.
The news isn't good. "There's a huge amount of anger," says Roubini, better known as Dr. Doom for having predicted the 2007-2008 financial crisis. He sees another recession coming; the only question being "whether it's going to be a plain-vanilla recession or one as severe as the last."
Alison WeirTo better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 U.N. action on Israel-Palestine.
The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the U.N. created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the U.S. governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.
In reality, while the U.N. General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.
Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.
Third, the U.S. administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.
Dozens of Israeli policemen and members of the so-called “Israel Land Authority” demolished and removed all tents and structures in Al Araqeeb village in the Negev., the thirtieth such attack against the village.Residents of all Arab villages in the area declared a strike and massive demonstration on Thursday morning at 11 at a protest tent set up to counter an Israeli plan to expropriate nearly 860.000 dunums (212510.6 acres) of Arab lands and displace nearly 30000 Arabs living in the “unreacognized” villages in the Negev.
Six Arab-Israeli towns in Israel's southern Negev region have ground to a halt in protest at government plans to confiscate swathes of land from the Bedouin community. If the proposal passes through the Knesset, Israel's parliament, unopposed, 30,000 people could be forced from their homes within 60 days.
Schools, shops and municipal offices across the region closed for the day allowing more than 8,000 people to stage a demonstration in Beersheba rejecting the plan – the largest civil protest in the city's history.
Arab-Israeli MP Jamal Zahalka said they were united against the proposal.
"We want to send a very clear message to the Israeli government – we are saying no. This demonstration proves that Israel's plans will be thwarted. Nobody here today will co-operate with them."
Left, Leymah Gbowee in September; center: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Liberian president, in June; right: Tawakul Karman in Sana, Yemen, on Wednesday.
LONDON — The Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 was awarded on Friday to three campaigning women from Africa and the Arab world in acknowledgment of their nonviolent role in promoting peace, democracy and gender equality. The winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa’s first elected female president — her compatriot, peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner.
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz showed up at “Occupy Wall Street” this week to show his support for the protest and clearly outline what he sees as the worst crimes of the American financial sector.
In a brief speech amplified by an “echo chamber” of protesters (who shouted Stiglitz’s own words as a group because they’re banned from using megaphones), the Colombia University professor said that Wall Street had become wealthy by “socializing losses and privatizing gain,” calling it a scheme that’s “not capitalism.”
ELABORATE SYMMETRICAL tile work on medieval Islamic buildings, such as this 15th-century Turkish mosque, seem to have been constructed from sets of decorated tiles.
Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium later. Researchers report that 15th-century buildings in Iran feature tiles arranged in a so-called quasicrystal, which is symmetric but does not repeat itself regularly.
"Here is evidence it [the pattern] was being used, if not understood, 500 years ahead of when we had any idea what was going on with [it] in the West," says physics graduate student Peter J. Lu of Harvard University. Lu began poring over photos from Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan after seeing hints of the pattern while traveling in Uzbekistan. The Islamic artisans seem to have spun a wide variety of symmetric traceries from a set of five shapes, according to a report Lu co-authored, published online February 22 in Science.
Image from settlers publication, 'The True Right' with caption: 'Nazileftist smashed with blows.'
If all I did in this post was tell you about the suffering of Israeli peace activists who were beaten and brutalized at a pogrom at Anatot a few days ago, I would be telling you little that was newsworthy or that you didn’t know already. I’ve already reported here that senior Israeli police officers not only stood by and did nothing while bones were broken and one settler attempted to knife a protester, but that the police actually directly beat up the activists who’d come to support a Palestinian farmer whose land had been stolen by the settlement.
No, all this would be old news. But what Idan Landau has done is to focus very specifically on the level of sexual violence meted out to the female protesters by the settlers. But not just by the male settlers, by the female settlers specifically. I’ve read about the violence of which settlers are capable for years. That’s nothing new. But what Idan has collected in his blog post is new. Here is my translation (pardon the strong language which is in the original Hebrew) along with links to the original Hebrew eyewitness sources. Israeli journalist Haggai Matar quotes this victim:
“Outside [the vehicle], settlers are banging on the windows making a sign with their fingers drawn across their throats to show that they would slash my throat. They shriek: ‘Bring her outside [the vehicle]. We’ll deal with her. Give her what she has coming to her, the whore!’”
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| Tony Blair has been accused of using his position in the Quartet to further his personal business interests [GALLO/GETTY] |
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| Some of the participants pose for a photo during the opening of the third Arab Bloggers Conference in Tunis [EPA] |
TUNIS, Tunisia – New forms of activism that have evolved in the Arab world in 2011 are being picked up by activists in the West, speakers at the Third Arab Bloggers' Meeting have affirmed.
The meeting is the first since the uprisings began, and brings some of the most prominent bloggers in the region together for a three-day gathering.
The UK has been named the worst place to live in Europe for quality of life, behind countries with damaged economies such as Ireland and Italy, according to the latest uSwitch quality of life index.
The UK emerged as having the second lowest hours of sunshine a year, the fourth highest retirement age, and the third lowest spend on health as a percentage of GDP.
Source-Daily Kos
