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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t about land anymore. It is about who is human, and who is not: who is a lord, and who is a helot. It is about power and domination, and the Israelis, by means of their much-vaunted "unilateral withdrawal" from parts of the occupied territories, have set up a theater in which their ideology of domination can be acted out indefinitely. Of course, they need a "reason" – which can be provoked or manufactured, as the case may be – but in reality they can invade at will, for any and no reason, and this ability to dominate is the payoff, the orgasmic climax the Israeli leadership is seeking.

The buzzing of Bashar al-Assad’s summer residence, the mass arrest of democratically elected Palestinian lawmakers and ministers, the targeting of infrastructure in violation of the Geneva accords and the commonly held concept of human decency – the Israelis do it simply because they can. This isn’t "colonialism" – it’s sadism.

Israel’s amen corner is constantly reiterating two themes that supposedly justify whatever horrific tactic the IDF employs: (1) The other side targets innocent civilians, and (2) Israel has the right to defend itself. The evil suicide bombings in pizza parlors and night clubs have – rightly – turned public opinion in the West against the perpetrators and lessened support for the Palestinian cause. Yet the tables are turning: Israel is now openly targeting the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. "Retaliation" for the kidnapping of a soldier and a Jewish settler on occupied lands is clearly not at all defensive: soldiers, after all, are fair game in wartime, and the settlers are clearly involved in an act of aggression, i.e., dispossessing Palestinians of their land.

Everything the Israelis do, according to them, is " retaliation," and dutifully reported as such in our hopelessly biased media. The clear implication of much of Western coverage of the current crisis is that this is the culmination of another one of those inexplicable bursts of Palestinian rage that bubbles up to the surface, seemingly, just in time to nix other, more positive developments – such as the moderate-radical split in Hamas, or recent indications that the newly elected Palestinian leadership may be willing to recognize the Jewish state.

Professor Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan, takes the media to task for dropping the context of the escalating conflict:

"The U.S. press has, as far as I can see, been irresponsible in not broadcasting much about the prologue to the present violence, the Israeli military’s bombing of civilians on a Gaza beach earlier in the month. This atrocity was on the front page of every Arabic language newspaper every day for a while earlier this month. We cannot understand the region if we cannot understand how outraged they are, and the source of the outrage."

The source he speaks about – a day at the beach.

On June 9, Israeli gunboats opened fire on beach-goers in Gaza, killing eight, including most of an entire family. The lone survivor of the Ghalia family, 10-year-old Huda, screaming in existential agony as she rolls around on the bloodstained sand and pounds it with her little fists, is bound to go down in history as an emblematic image of the Palestinian struggle for statehood – and for the full humanity of an entire people. Do you want to understand why the medievalist ideologues of Hamas have come to power in Palestine? Then just look at this video one more time, particularly the first part, and then tell me you just don’t understand.

The Israeli response has been outright denial. This denialism is expressed in terms that recall the fanatic illogic of the Holocaust-deniers, who focus on weird out-of-context details (there were no gas chambers, and the gas couldn’t have killed anyway, besides which the order for the Holocaust was never signed by Hitler, etc., ad nauseam). They exclude all evidence – like, say, those piles of bodies we’ve all seen, and the testimony of the survivors – that doesn’t fit their denialist paradigm, and deride the killing of millions as a " Holo-hoax." The parallels with Israeli denialism in the face of the IDF’s murderous brutality are eerily similar, as this Human Rights Watch analysis shows:

"The IDF’s conclusion that it was not responsible for the deaths on the beach was based exclusively on information gathered by the IDF and excluded all evidence gathered by other sources. Its investigation centered on mathematical models said to show a ‘statistical impossibility’ that a shell fired by IDF artillery was responsible for killing the civilians. The reliability of such a conclusion should be evaluated by independent experts with access to the underlying data."

"An investigation that refuses to look at contradictory evidence can hardly be considered credible," says the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, Marc Garlasco – but not according to the mindset of nationalist fanatics, who see reality through ethnic-tinted lenses. Major-General Meir Kalifi, who oversaw the Israeli "internal investigation," avers that Palestinian witnesses are to be discounted because they "have no problem lying." Therefore, any and all evidence submitted by Palestinian officials was thrown in the trash, including "155mm shrapnel, both new and old, and dirt from the beach and crater." This interdict also includes evidence offered by Westerners who don’t toe the Israeli line, including Human Rights Watch researchers who offered the general proof of Israeli culpability and were similarly rebuffed.

The IDF claims the murdered beach-goers and over 40 wounded were hit after 4:50 p.m. on June 9, when the Israeli shelling had ceased. However, independent sources document that the killings occurred well within range of the shelling period:

"Computerized hospital records that show children injured at the beach were treated by 5:12 p.m., and handwritten hospital records that show they were admitted at 5:05 p.m. In light of the 20-minute round trip drive between the hospital and the beach, this evidence suggests that the blast that caused the family’s death occurred during the time of the IDF shelling."

The Israeli response to this mountain of evidence is… more classic denialist drivel. Shrapnel removed from the bodies of the murdered is dismissed by Gen. Kalifi: Anyone, he avers, can dip shrapnel in blood! The official Israeli line on the Gaza Beach Massacre is that a gigantic conspiracy was instantly created by Palestinian groups and their Western accomplices to frame the IDF and Israel for the senseless murders, and that the members of this conspiracy were instantly mobilized, moving within moments of the shelling to pull off a gigantic hoax.

Again, this limns the mindset of the Holocaust-deniers, who portray a huge, all-powerful "Zionist conspiracy" that systematically fakes evidence, suppresses the "truth," and falsifies history. Jewish critics of the "Holo-hoax" mythos rightly deride the fantastic conspiracy theories of the denialists as being so outlandish as to be laughable as well as sinister. Human Rights Watch spokesman Garlasco takes a similar approach to the Israeli denialists and their conspiracy theories:

"’If the Israeli allegations of tampered evidence are to be believed, many Palestinians would have to have engaged in a massive and immediate conspiracy to falsify the data,’ said Garlasco. ‘The conspirators – witnesses, victims, medical personnel, and bomb disposal staff – would have had to falsify their testimony, amend digital and handwritten records, and dip shrapnel into a victim’s blood. It beggars belief that such a huge conspiracy could be orchestrated so quickly.’"

It beggars belief – unless you’ll believe anything that fits your ideological preconceptions. In which case, anything goes, and it is possible to dismiss the evidence provided by your lying eyes – the shattered bodies of Palestinian children, for instance, who a moment ago were cavorting happily on a beach.

The Israeli blitz is clearly a response, not to the pinpricks of the mostly ineffective assaults on outlying Israeli suburbs, nor even to the electoral triumph of Hamas, but to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the resources and attention of enemy regimes and guerrilla groups diverted away from Palestine and toward Iraq, the pressure is off the Israelis, and they are free to ride roughshod over the occupied territories, absorbing what they need (and can get away with) and discarding the useless bits. Israel is preparing to unilaterally "settle" the Palestinian question by establishing its own borders and crouching behind the " security fence" that accidentally-on-purpose annexes many acres of valuable farmland.

As John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt put it in their recent Harvard University study, " The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the main purpose of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to further Tel Aviv’s military position and security interests. As the Israelis roll over the Palestinians in this latest series of attacks, we can see how that purpose has been very well served.

Unprecedented number of Israeli websites hacked: Hundreds of websites were damaged by hackers in recent hours, following IDF activity in the Gaza Strip. The hackers are members of the Moroccan “Team Evil” group, responsible for most of the website damage in Israel in the past year. This is the largest, most concentrated attack on Israeli websites in recent years.

A Ynet investigation revealed that more than 750 Israeli websites, on a number of different domains, were hacked into and damaged in recent days. Prominent among them were the Soldier’s Treasury Bank, Bank Hapoalim (not the main page), Rambam Hospital, the Society for Culture and Housing, BMW Israel, Subaru Israel, Jump Fashion, non-profit organization “Yedid,” Kadima’s youth website, and the Globus Group ticket center. Many of these sites have not yet returned to normal.

Hackers left the message: You’re killing Palestinians, we’re killing servers.

Early on Wednesday, the IDF began operation “Summer Rains” in Gaza: Forces entered the southern end of the strip, adjacent to the point of Cpl. Gilad Shavit’s kidnap. The air force attacked a power station and blacked out areas of Gaza. Three bridges were bombed in central Gaza, in order to prevent movement of the kidnapped soldier.  

Many Israeli websites are hacked every day – most of these are small sites, with inadequate information security. It is significantly different when the sites are ones of large companies, who have adequate defenses from this sort of attack.

Past success of Team Evil

In the past, Team Evil succeeded in hacking into several sites of medium-sized but recognized Israeli companies. In April, they hit tens of sites, including those of the “Shilav” children’s store, “The Blue Square” supermarket and McDonald’s.

The group’s spokesman previously told Ynet that “we are a group of Moroccan hackers that hack into sites as part of the resistance in the war with Israel. We attack Israeli sites every day. This is our duty…hacking is not a crime.”

Added another group member: “We want Israel to stop fighting. Stop killing children and we’ll stop hacking.” According to the spokesman, the group’s members are all Moroccan youths, under the age of 20.

The increase in hacking of websites following military operations is a well-known phenomenon, in Israel and in the rest of the world. A similar increase was seen in attacks on both Israeli and Arab websites in the first days of the second intifada, pursuant to military operations that took place in Gaza, Judea and Samaria at that time.

Nevertheless, politics should not be the greatest international concern. For over in Gaza, one appalling act must now eclipse all thoughts of "road maps" or "mutual gestures": on Wednesday, Israeli war planes repeatedly bombed and utterly demolished Gaza’s only power plant. About 700,000 of Gaza’s 1.3 million people now have no electricity, and word is that power cannot be restored for six months.

It is not the immediate human conditions created by this strike that are monumental. Those conditions are, of course, bad enough. No lights, no refrigerators, no fans through the suffocating Gaza summer heat. No going outside for air, due to ongoing bombing and Israel’s impending military assault. In the hot darkness, massive explosions shake the cities, close and far, while repeated sonic booms are doubtless wreaking the havoc they have wrought before: smashing windows, sending children screaming into the arms of terrified adults, old people collapsing with heart failure, pregnant women collapsing with spontaneous abortions. Mass terror, despair, desperate hoarding of food and water. And no radios, television, cell phones, or laptops (for the few who have them), and so no way to get news of how long this nightmare might go on.

But this time, the situation is worse than that. As food in the refrigerators spoils, the only remaining food is grains. Most people cook with gas, but with the borders sealed, soon there will be no gas. When family-kitchen propane tanks run out, there will be no cooking. No cooked lentils or beans, no humus, no bread ­ the staples Palestinian foods, the only food for the poor. (And there is no firewood or coal in dry, overcrowded Gaza.)

And yet, even all this misery is overshadowed by a grimmer fact: no water. Gaza’s public water supply is pumped by electricity. The taps, too, are dry. No sewage system. And again, word is that the electricity is out for at least six months.

The Gaza aquifer is already contaminated with sea water and sewage, due to over-pumping (partly by those now-abandoned Israeli settlements) and the grossly inadequate sewage system. To be drinkable, well water is purified through machinery run by electricity. Otherwise, the brackish water must at least be boiled before it can be consumed, but this requires electricity or gas. And people will soon have neither.

Drinking unpurified water means sickness, even cholera. If cholera breaks out, it will spread like wildfire in a population so densely packed and lacking fuel or water for sanitation. And the hospitals and clinics aren’t functioning, either, because there is no electricity.

Finally, people can’t leave. None of the neighboring countries have resources to absorb a million desperate and impoverished refugees: logistically and politically, the flood would entirely destabilize Egypt, for example. But Palestinians in Gaza can’t seek sanctuary with their relatives in the West Bank, either, because they can’t get out of Gaza to get there. They can’t even go over the border into Egypt and around through Jordan, because Israel will no longer allow people with Gaza identification cards to enter the West Bank. In any case, a cordon of Palestinian police are blocking people from trying to scramble over the Egyptian border–and war refugees have tried, through a hole blown open by militants, clutching packages and children.

In short, over a million civilians are now trapped, hunkered in their homes listening to Israeli shells, while facing the awful prospect, within days or weeks, of having to give toxic water to their children that may consign them to quick but agonizing deaths.

One woman near the Rafah border, taking care of her nephews, spoke to BBC: "If I am frightened in front of them I think they will die of fear." If the international community does nothing, her children may soon die anyway.

The astonishing scale of this humanitarian situation is indeed matched only by the deafening drizzle of international reaction. "Of course it is understandable that [the Israelis] would want to go after those who kidnapped their soldier," says Kofi Anan (while the Palestinian population cowers in the dark listening to thundering explosions demolish their society), "but it has to be done in such a way that civilian populations are not made to suffer." Even as Israel bombs smash Gaza’s roadways, the G-8 stands up on its hind-legs to intone, "We call on Israel to exercise utmost restraint in the current crisis." How about the Russians, now angling for position in the new "Great Game" of the Middle East? "The right and duty of the government of Israel to defend the lives and security of its citizens are beyond doubt," says Russia’s foreign ministry, as though poor Corporal Shalit warrants any of this mayhem, "But this should not be done at the cost of many lives and the lives of many Palestinian civilians, by massive military strikes with heavy consequences for the civilian population."

And what says noble Europe, proud font of human rights conventions, architects of the misión civilizatrice? "The EU remains deeply concerned," mumbles the mighty defenders of humanitarian law, "about the worsening security and humanitarian developments." Seemingly soggy phrases like "deeply concerned" are diplomatic code for "We are seriously unhappy." But under these circumstances, "remains deeply concerned" suggests that this staggering crime is just one more sobering moment in the failed "road map."

Diplomatic bubbles of unreality in the Middle East are the norm rather than the exception, but at some point the international community must face the very unwelcome fact that it needs to change gear. A country that claims kinship among the western democracies of Europe is behaving like a murderous rogue regime, using any excuse to reduce over a million people to utter human misery and even mass death. Plastering Corporal Shalit’s face over this policy is no more convincing that South African newspapers emblazoning the picture of one poor murdered white doctor over their coverage of the 1976 Soweto uprising.

Israel has done many things argued to be war crimes: mass house demolitions, closing whole cities for weeks, indefinite "preventative" detentions, massive land confiscation, the razing of thousands of square miles of Palestinian olive groves and agriculture, systematic physical and mental torture of prisoners, extrajudicial killings, aerial bombardment of civilian areas, collective punishment of every description in defiance of the Geneva Conventions–not to mention the general humiliation and ruin of the indigenous people under its military control. But destroying the only power source for a trapped and defenseless civilian population is an unprecedented step toward barbarity. It reeks, ironically, of the Warsaw Ghetto. As we flutter our hands about tectonic political change, we must take pause: in the eyes of history, what is happening in Gaza may come to eclipse them all.

Dr. Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, currently working in South Africa. She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.

ARIANE WEBSTER, SUSPECT’S GRANDMOTHER: I’m — truly down in my heart I believe that’s a stone lie. I been knowing Nassir (ph) better than five years. I never know him to get in any trouble. I never know him to have any problem with anybody. I always know him, he taught my son how to do karate. I have a son that is 18 years old. When he first met my son, my son was only about …

ANDREWS (reporter) : So you don’t think he’s a terrorist, as the government’s alleging?

WEBSTER: No, I don’t. I really don’t believe that.

MASTER G.H.G. ATHEA, SUSPECT’S FRIEND: Someone along the line offered to him some funds to do whatever he wanted to do if that’s what he wanted to do. As far as some subversive work. And said they would give him whatever he needed.

ANDREWS: So somebody had approached him to give him money to blow up buildings?

ATHEA: To do whatever he wanted to do. But that was far from his mind. So he had no desire to interact with these men to accept anything they had to offer.

ANDREWS: So bottom line here, is your friend a terrorist?

ATHEA: No, he’s not. Absolutely not.

The key comment here is from the suspects friend. It clearly looks as if the "someone" who tried to bend his ear and convince him to join Al-Qaeda was acting on behalf of the US government and running an entrapment sting.

Entrapment is the primary method used to expose supposed Al-Qaeda cells, the evidence of which they were dangerous terrorists later dissolves into thin air in every single instance. It was used in the Canadian scare earlier this month and also recently in the Toledo arrests.

Attorney General Gonzales said that "the individual they thought was a member of al-Qaida was present at their meetings and in actuality he was working with the South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force."

This is classic entrapment and the artificial manufacture of an Al-Qaeda boogeyman to wave in front of the American people.

Batiste was most likely told that he was part of an anti-terror drill to test the security of Chicago landmarks and that he had to recruit a mock group of followers. Either that or he was a hand-picked idiot who had severe mental deficiencies and couldn’t spot and obvious set-up.

One of the repeating elements to emerge from every major terror sting or forged terror alert is the use of retarded individuals as patsies, informants and go-betweens. The terror raid in Forest Gate three weeks ago in which an innocent man was shot by the police was conducted on the whim of information provided by a man with an IQ of just 69.

Similarly, it was reported today that the informant who sparked interest in alleged Ottawa terrorist Mohamed Harkat was "certifiably insane."

The group used by the FBI to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993 were also clinically retarded. It’s easier to frame people who lack any credibility and don’t have any means to eloquently defend themselves.

Don’t be surprised to learn of a connection to a retarded individual over the next few days.

We shouldn’t be lapse in our understanding that the Sears Tower is indeed the target of deranged terrorist masters who want to destroy America. Internet speculation that the landmark would be attacked on April 19, 2004 was rubbished by many and yet a derailing of the plot was quietly announced that very day yet given no play in the establishment media.

In March 2004, Silverstein Properties bought the tower in an $800 million deal. Larry Silverstein’s penchant for large insurance pay outs, coupled with the strange coincidence of buildings only owned by him collapsing on 9/11, makes for a dangerous combination.

The Sears Tower is indeed under threat – not from government created patsies, but the elite itself.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN’s environment programme, said: "Humankind’s ability to exploit the deep oceans and high seas has accelerated rapidly over recent years. It is a pace of change that has outstripped our institutions and conservation efforts."

Global climate faced an abrupt change that could lead to the melting of most of the world’s glaciers in the near future, threatening freshwater supplies in the most populous regions on earth. Full Story