A REQUIEM FOR DEMOCRACY IN PALESTINE
Where The &^*& is the MEDIA!! | 20.06.2007 19:29 | Anti-racism | World
The Neo-Fascists' Propaganda is exposed by their actions against the real effects of their empty NewSpeak such as "Freedom and Democracy", which have become nothing more than smokescreens for Repression, Aggression, and Fascism.
A REQUIEM FOR DEMOCRACY IN PALESTINE
First it was referred to as street fighting. It then was called a Civil War.
Now that the boundaries seem to be established by the rival factions, it is now referred by some in the West as post-revolutionary times.
It is becoming more and more apparent as the days go by that this whole mess started, not as a result of disagreements between Fatah and Hamas, but because of the fact that both Israel and Washington refused to recognise the results of the election held in the Palestinian Territories last year. Now with Olmert and Bush 'mapping out' the future of the Palestinian people, it is even more apparent that the Occupation will continue and Abbas will head the new 'Puppet Regime' in the West Bank, while the population of Gaza will continue to be cut off from the world until their leaders 'give in' to Israeli blackmail. We are seeing the establishment of a new government based on money and power.... nothing at all to do with what the people want.
All of the above does not sound like a revolution to me. Sounds more like an illegal takeover of a democratically elected government by outside elements. There is bitterness towards Abbas in Gaza at the present time. He is seen by many as a collaborator with Israel and the West. His actions of dissolving the government and declaring a new one benefits only those outside forces that he is accused of collaborating with. Certainly the people themselves did not opt for a further separation of each other, as is now the case. Surely Abbas realises that the people in the West Bank, which he now supposedly rules, have close relatives and friends in Gaza. How is he going to deal with a situation when these people wish to start traveling back and forth? There certainly are interesting days ahead and days that surely will prove disastrous to Abbas' illegal maneuvers. He, of all people, should realise that it was Hamas that was elected... not Olmert and certainly not Bush.
The New York Times had an interesting take on the situation in Gaza today... it's worth reading. It deals with the confusion and fears felt by many in the area because of the uncertainty of their future... a future that many feel will not be decided for by themselves.
Gazans Adjust to Power Shift as New Rulers Revel
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 20, 2007
GAZA, June 19 — Muhammad al-Borniah, 23, shook a little on Tuesday as he showed off the tiny cell, No. 13, where he spent five days in January as a prisoner of the Palestinian Preventive Security, the elite Fatah force that dealt with subversion.
“I felt then that I was dead, that I would never come out of there,” Mr. Borniah said, his voice wavering. Then he threw back his shoulders. “Now,” he said, dressed in his uniform of the Hamas military wing, the Qassam Brigades, with two automatic rifles over his shoulders, “now I feel victory.”
Mr. Borniah was arrested at his mosque by Fatah gunmen, in a series of tit-for-tat kidnappings between the two Palestinian factions, part of the cycle of vengeance that culminated last week in the routing of Fatah and the military takeover of this impoverished coastal strip by Hamas.
Outside of the Preventive Security compound, the Qassam Brigades, Gaza’s new security force, patrolled what once was Fatah’s center of power, feared by every Hamas member. They showed off in their new Japanese trucks and Jeep Grand Cherokees, seized from Fatah.
It was here that many Hamas leaders were beaten and tortured.
Now, in post-revolutionary Gaza, the place is trashed and looted, toilets and tiles ripped away, offices emptied of computers, furniture, light fixtures, doors and electric wiring. Bits of plastic plumbing dot the courtyard, mixed with broken glass, burned files, the charred manual to a computer and the melted paper tray of a photocopier.
A green Hamas flag flies over the building, a tourist site for Hamas members and their families. Um Omran came to see where her son had been tortured. She said he was killed in 2003 by Fatah. Her husband’s brother had also been held there. He was Adnan al-Ghul, the man credited with inventing the first Qassam rocket in 2001, a weapon that Hamas has used to terrorize Israeli cities like Sderot. He was killed by the Israelis in 2004.
“We’re all Qassam in our family, the women and the men,” Ms. Omran said. “I wanted to see this place where my son was tortured.” Asked if she was ashamed by the bloodletting among Palestinians, she said: “Fatah pushed us toward this.”
But Hamas’s victory has left many Gazans feeling vulnerable and afraid.
Ghada, 50, a Palestinian Christian, is afraid to go outside. When she does, “You have all these men suddenly in the street with these long beards, and they look at you in surprise, from up to down, and their look is, like, why are you like this?” Several times, young men have told her she should be killed for not wearing a head covering.
Ghada, who asked that her last name not be used, and who works for an Arab consulate here, now will only take a taxi to her office. On Sunday, the Latin Church and Rosary Sisters School were ransacked and looted, with crosses and Bibles destroyed. Hamas leaders condemned the attack and denied responsibility, but the small Christian community here is anxious.
“Many of us are thinking about leaving Gaza for the West Bank once the crossings are open,” Ghada said. Then she said angrily, “I can’t leave my home — why should I leave it?”
A moment later, she said, “But I may leave for a time until the situation is more clear.”
The Palestinian infighting has shamed everyone, she said.
“Look at how Hamas and Fatah fought each other, and they’re both Palestinian and both Muslim,” she said. “If they do this to each other, what can they do to others? Now it’s to the advantage of Hamas to make it calm, but afterward we don’t know what they’re up to.”
In another recent attack also condemned by the Hamas leadership, a statue of the Unknown Soldier, a symbol of Palestine, was removed from a Gaza square and smashed. Some Muslims believe that statuary, like portraiture, is forbidden.
There are other fears. A member of the Preventive Security Force, who asked not be identified, is in hiding, not trusting Hamas’s assertions that no harm will come to him.
Tahani Skaik, a well-known painter here who also works for the Ministry of Agriculture, is afraid she will be fired from her job.
“There’s so much we don’t know,” she said, shopping with her husband to stock up on staples like rice, flour, cooking oil and noodles, which are all running short because of the closing of the crossings in and out of Israel. “Everything is very vague,” she said. “In a way, the day is darker than the night. There is no feeling of safety.”
When she left her office on Tuesday, she said, “I took home all my personal stuff.”
Ms. Skaik, 50, wears a head scarf, but her family has been affiliated with Fatah. Their lives have bounced around the region: they fled to Kuwait when Israel conquered Gaza in 1967, then fled Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded to come back to Gaza. “And now Palestinians are fighting a war among themselves,” she said. “This hurts us the most.”
She paints nationalist pictures of Palestine. Asked if a Palestinian state seemed any closer now, her face collapsed. “I feel now it’s far away,” she said. “As a Palestinian I feel very empty.”
A shopkeeper, Hazen Hassouni, 36, said he was running very short on supplies of rice and potatoes, sugar, milk, yogurt and cheese. He is not happy with the Hamas victory, but agrees with their edict not to raise prices due to shortages. Cigarettes, however, have gone up 30 percent to more than $3 a pack, a large sum for Gaza.
He listens to the radio for news, but Fatah journalists at its two radio stations have fled, leaving only Hamas radio and television and the satellite channels. Palestinian television, run by Fatah, has no office here now, but broadcasts from Ramallah, in the West Bank. While few Gazans used to watch it, more do now, people say, just to hear Fatah’s view of the news.
Asked if the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, can restore his authority here, Mr. Hassouni laughed. “Abu Mazen?” he asked incredulously, using a common name for Mr. Abbas. “How? He’s gone.”
Inside Mr. Abbas’s presidential compound here, near the beach, a mural of Yasir Arafat and Mr. Abbas is scarred, with chips of painted brick shot away by rifle rounds. At the gate of the compound, to show some respect, is one of the only Palestinian flags to be seen today in Gaza City.
But there are two green Hamas flags on the gate, too, and one of them is placed higher than the Palestinian one.
Just outside, a convoy of armored white United Nations jeeps waited. Suddenly two Jeep Cherokees with police lights, now manned by the Qassam Brigades, arrived to escort them. Sirens wailing, tires screeching, the new rulers of Gaza pulled out into the street, to make sure that their foreign guests felt secure.
desertpeace.blogspot.com/2007/06/abbas-now-history-in-gaza.html
Carter: Stop favoring Fatah over Hamas
The greatest trick the Neo-Fascists have pulled is tricking the world into regarding the people who kill on their behalf, with weapons and funds they provide, as "moderates".
israel.indymedia.org/newswire/display/6901/index.php
First it was referred to as street fighting. It then was called a Civil War.
Now that the boundaries seem to be established by the rival factions, it is now referred by some in the West as post-revolutionary times.
It is becoming more and more apparent as the days go by that this whole mess started, not as a result of disagreements between Fatah and Hamas, but because of the fact that both Israel and Washington refused to recognise the results of the election held in the Palestinian Territories last year. Now with Olmert and Bush 'mapping out' the future of the Palestinian people, it is even more apparent that the Occupation will continue and Abbas will head the new 'Puppet Regime' in the West Bank, while the population of Gaza will continue to be cut off from the world until their leaders 'give in' to Israeli blackmail. We are seeing the establishment of a new government based on money and power.... nothing at all to do with what the people want.
All of the above does not sound like a revolution to me. Sounds more like an illegal takeover of a democratically elected government by outside elements. There is bitterness towards Abbas in Gaza at the present time. He is seen by many as a collaborator with Israel and the West. His actions of dissolving the government and declaring a new one benefits only those outside forces that he is accused of collaborating with. Certainly the people themselves did not opt for a further separation of each other, as is now the case. Surely Abbas realises that the people in the West Bank, which he now supposedly rules, have close relatives and friends in Gaza. How is he going to deal with a situation when these people wish to start traveling back and forth? There certainly are interesting days ahead and days that surely will prove disastrous to Abbas' illegal maneuvers. He, of all people, should realise that it was Hamas that was elected... not Olmert and certainly not Bush.
The New York Times had an interesting take on the situation in Gaza today... it's worth reading. It deals with the confusion and fears felt by many in the area because of the uncertainty of their future... a future that many feel will not be decided for by themselves.
Gazans Adjust to Power Shift as New Rulers Revel
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 20, 2007
GAZA, June 19 — Muhammad al-Borniah, 23, shook a little on Tuesday as he showed off the tiny cell, No. 13, where he spent five days in January as a prisoner of the Palestinian Preventive Security, the elite Fatah force that dealt with subversion.
“I felt then that I was dead, that I would never come out of there,” Mr. Borniah said, his voice wavering. Then he threw back his shoulders. “Now,” he said, dressed in his uniform of the Hamas military wing, the Qassam Brigades, with two automatic rifles over his shoulders, “now I feel victory.”
Mr. Borniah was arrested at his mosque by Fatah gunmen, in a series of tit-for-tat kidnappings between the two Palestinian factions, part of the cycle of vengeance that culminated last week in the routing of Fatah and the military takeover of this impoverished coastal strip by Hamas.
Outside of the Preventive Security compound, the Qassam Brigades, Gaza’s new security force, patrolled what once was Fatah’s center of power, feared by every Hamas member. They showed off in their new Japanese trucks and Jeep Grand Cherokees, seized from Fatah.
It was here that many Hamas leaders were beaten and tortured.
Now, in post-revolutionary Gaza, the place is trashed and looted, toilets and tiles ripped away, offices emptied of computers, furniture, light fixtures, doors and electric wiring. Bits of plastic plumbing dot the courtyard, mixed with broken glass, burned files, the charred manual to a computer and the melted paper tray of a photocopier.
A green Hamas flag flies over the building, a tourist site for Hamas members and their families. Um Omran came to see where her son had been tortured. She said he was killed in 2003 by Fatah. Her husband’s brother had also been held there. He was Adnan al-Ghul, the man credited with inventing the first Qassam rocket in 2001, a weapon that Hamas has used to terrorize Israeli cities like Sderot. He was killed by the Israelis in 2004.
“We’re all Qassam in our family, the women and the men,” Ms. Omran said. “I wanted to see this place where my son was tortured.” Asked if she was ashamed by the bloodletting among Palestinians, she said: “Fatah pushed us toward this.”
But Hamas’s victory has left many Gazans feeling vulnerable and afraid.
Ghada, 50, a Palestinian Christian, is afraid to go outside. When she does, “You have all these men suddenly in the street with these long beards, and they look at you in surprise, from up to down, and their look is, like, why are you like this?” Several times, young men have told her she should be killed for not wearing a head covering.
Ghada, who asked that her last name not be used, and who works for an Arab consulate here, now will only take a taxi to her office. On Sunday, the Latin Church and Rosary Sisters School were ransacked and looted, with crosses and Bibles destroyed. Hamas leaders condemned the attack and denied responsibility, but the small Christian community here is anxious.
“Many of us are thinking about leaving Gaza for the West Bank once the crossings are open,” Ghada said. Then she said angrily, “I can’t leave my home — why should I leave it?”
A moment later, she said, “But I may leave for a time until the situation is more clear.”
The Palestinian infighting has shamed everyone, she said.
“Look at how Hamas and Fatah fought each other, and they’re both Palestinian and both Muslim,” she said. “If they do this to each other, what can they do to others? Now it’s to the advantage of Hamas to make it calm, but afterward we don’t know what they’re up to.”
In another recent attack also condemned by the Hamas leadership, a statue of the Unknown Soldier, a symbol of Palestine, was removed from a Gaza square and smashed. Some Muslims believe that statuary, like portraiture, is forbidden.
There are other fears. A member of the Preventive Security Force, who asked not be identified, is in hiding, not trusting Hamas’s assertions that no harm will come to him.
Tahani Skaik, a well-known painter here who also works for the Ministry of Agriculture, is afraid she will be fired from her job.
“There’s so much we don’t know,” she said, shopping with her husband to stock up on staples like rice, flour, cooking oil and noodles, which are all running short because of the closing of the crossings in and out of Israel. “Everything is very vague,” she said. “In a way, the day is darker than the night. There is no feeling of safety.”
When she left her office on Tuesday, she said, “I took home all my personal stuff.”
Ms. Skaik, 50, wears a head scarf, but her family has been affiliated with Fatah. Their lives have bounced around the region: they fled to Kuwait when Israel conquered Gaza in 1967, then fled Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded to come back to Gaza. “And now Palestinians are fighting a war among themselves,” she said. “This hurts us the most.”
She paints nationalist pictures of Palestine. Asked if a Palestinian state seemed any closer now, her face collapsed. “I feel now it’s far away,” she said. “As a Palestinian I feel very empty.”
A shopkeeper, Hazen Hassouni, 36, said he was running very short on supplies of rice and potatoes, sugar, milk, yogurt and cheese. He is not happy with the Hamas victory, but agrees with their edict not to raise prices due to shortages. Cigarettes, however, have gone up 30 percent to more than $3 a pack, a large sum for Gaza.
He listens to the radio for news, but Fatah journalists at its two radio stations have fled, leaving only Hamas radio and television and the satellite channels. Palestinian television, run by Fatah, has no office here now, but broadcasts from Ramallah, in the West Bank. While few Gazans used to watch it, more do now, people say, just to hear Fatah’s view of the news.
Asked if the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, can restore his authority here, Mr. Hassouni laughed. “Abu Mazen?” he asked incredulously, using a common name for Mr. Abbas. “How? He’s gone.”
Inside Mr. Abbas’s presidential compound here, near the beach, a mural of Yasir Arafat and Mr. Abbas is scarred, with chips of painted brick shot away by rifle rounds. At the gate of the compound, to show some respect, is one of the only Palestinian flags to be seen today in Gaza City.
But there are two green Hamas flags on the gate, too, and one of them is placed higher than the Palestinian one.
Just outside, a convoy of armored white United Nations jeeps waited. Suddenly two Jeep Cherokees with police lights, now manned by the Qassam Brigades, arrived to escort them. Sirens wailing, tires screeching, the new rulers of Gaza pulled out into the street, to make sure that their foreign guests felt secure.
desertpeace.blogspot.com/2007/06/abbas-now-history-in-gaza.html
Carter: Stop favoring Fatah over Hamas
The greatest trick the Neo-Fascists have pulled is tricking the world into regarding the people who kill on their behalf, with weapons and funds they provide, as "moderates".
israel.indymedia.org/newswire/display/6901/index.php
Where The &^*& is the MEDIA!!
