By Sami Moubayed, Special to Gulf News

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad went to Tehran last Saturday for a much publicised meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His two-day visit received a lot of media attention, coming in the midst of Saudi-Iranian talks over Lebanon, the situation in Palestine and much speculation on how Syria can help combat the insurgency in Iraq.

The new Iraqi oil law (leaked) (and translated). ... - The new Iraqi oil law (leaked) (and translated). (thanks Raed) [The Angry Arab]

Beirutis have a saying about Hariri: Ammar hajar wa dammar bashar--he built the stones and destroyed the people. But my favorite obituary of Hariri is more charitable. It came from the mother of a friend of mine, an old woman who has seen decades of zaims, of warlords with the same last names, come and go. As we walked past the patch of seafront where the big man was killed, she shook her head. "Hariri kaan mujrim, allah yirhamu," she sighed, with ironic resignation--Hariri was a criminal, may God have mercy on his soul. [The Nation ]

Rove Said to Have Received 2003 Iranian Proposal - Excerpt: Karl Rove, then White House deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush, received a copy of the secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Republican Congressman Bob Ney in early May 2003, according to an Iranian-American scholar who was then on his Congressional staff. [AntiWar]

"Documents show new secretive US prison program is... - [The Angry Arab]

"Carter's book [Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid], by the way, is mostly just Christian Zionism. It ignores 1400 years of Muslim history in Palestine and Jerusalem, accepts Peters's false thesis of significant in-migration of Arabs in the interwar period, and only dares raise some timid protests about the execrable treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories by Israeli occupiers and colonists." Source

A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over the rights and wrongs of criticising Israel. At its centre is a British historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about Israel. His opponents say his views give succour to anti-Semites. One thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been shattered.

Source

By JACQUES STEINBERG

“On the Road in America” looks, on first viewing, like the sort of television show that Al Jazeera and MTV might produce if they could be coaxed together in front of an editing terminal. A 12-part reality series, currently being broadcast throughout the Middle East, “On the Road” features a caravan of young, good-looking Arabs crisscrossing America on a mission to educate themselves and the people they encounter along the way.
Source

December 5, 2006 By VIRGINIA TILLEY Johannesburg, South Africa On November 27, Ehud Olmert responded to frantic international pressure and US hand signals by delivering what was billed as a "landmark" policy speech. The BBC has raised a faint cheer for the "new mood" it seems to signal. But the occasion, an annual memorial for Ben Gurion, was appropriate: in silky language, Mr. Olmert baldly reiterated the same terms and conditions that have blocked all progress toward Middle East peace for years. Talks with the Palestinian Authority, Mr.

"Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the [South Africa's] apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites."

Human Rights Watch Accuses Israel of War Crimes - Human Rights Watch Accuses Israel of War Crimes [CommonDreams]

Hizbullah's attacks stem from Israeli incursions into Lebanon
By Anders Strindberg
NEW YORK

As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created this crisis. Israel is defending itself. The underlying problem is Arab extremism.

Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of Israel's silent but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.

Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored "blue line" on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has been the pattern.

"The truth is that there never could have been a partition of Palestine by ethically acceptable means. Israel was created through terror and it needs terror to cover-up its core immorality. Whenever there is a glimmer of stability, the state orders a targeted assassination, such as that in Sidon which preceded the current Lebanon crisis, knowing well that this brings not security but more violence. Israel's unilateralism and the cycle of violence nourish one another." Source

by Oren Ben-Dor

What exactly is being defended? Is it the citizens of Israel or the nature of the Israeli state?
Published: 26 July 2006

As its citizens are being killed, Israel is, yet again, inflicting death and destruction on Lebanon. It tries to portray this horror as necessary for its self-defence. Indeed, the casual observer might regard the rocket attacks on Israeli cities such as Haifa and my own home town, Nahariya, as justifying this claim.

While states should defend their citizens, states which fail this duty should be questioned and, if necessary, reconfigured. Israel is a state which, instead of defending its citizens, puts all of them, Jews as well as non-Jews, in danger.

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” too fattened on Camembert to stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s whim.

The French government’s rationale for its new labor law was impeccable from an economist’s standpoint: Make it easier for employers to fire people and they will be more willing to hire people. So why was Paris burning?

"U.S. foreign policy shapes events in every corner of the globe. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East, a region of recurring instability and enormous strategic importance. Most recently, the Bush Administration.s attempt to transform the region into a community of democracies has helped produce a resilient insurency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman. With so much at stake for so many, all countries need to understand the forces that drive U.S. Middle East policy.

The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and eopardized U.S. security.

This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperativs. As we show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States povides to Israel.

Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the .Israel Lobby.. Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical."

The War Within the Antiwar Movement - CounterPunch - The War Within the Antiwar MovementCounterPunch, CA - 3 hours ago... However NY's 10/17/89 Newsday ran a piece by Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute, about a Dinkins' campaign meeting: "Arab-Americans were told that they ... [Google:Arab American]

How Chrsitian and Jewish Zionists and terrorists undermined the US
by Anisa Abd el Fattah

"What can we do about those people, who claim to be US patriots who knowingly sought to use Muslims, and especially Muslim Americans as scapegoats and decoys while they secretly carried out the very crimes, and harbored in their hearts the very obvious hatred for the US, our way of life and our Constitution, that they had so passionately blamed on Muslims?"

The Jack Abramoff scandal is more than a scandal; it is a cause for international shame. It is also the story of how religious zealots, terrorists and fanatics took over the United States government, undermined our foreign interests, ruined our credibility, and cost us our prestige as a trustworthy world leader, while leading more than 2000 US soldiers and Marines to their deaths along with thousands of innocent Muslims and others, in pursuit of a fantasy that they call Zion. We all assumed that their Zionist dreamland was Israel; we now know that it also obviously included the United States. The immense shame that our Congress should be experiencing as a result of its failure to protect our country and our children from these zealots is not yet apparent, since our so-called “elected representatives” in Washington, the best Congress that money could buy, is busy discarding the evidence of their role in undermining world peace, while destroying the United States internationally, and their possibly criminal culpability in the untimely deaths of American soldiers and Marines, and more than 30 thousand innocent civilians in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands more in Palestine and Lebanon, in the process. No doubt at some point, the international courts will take up these issues.

Will Asad Fall? - The blog Hunna Syria remarks on how the Baath Party flag has been taken down in front of some ministries, leaving only the Syria flag flying. Flying the Syrian flag without other embellishments has become the norm during the past several months. Even posters and images of the President are surprisingly absent. In Hafiz's day, it would have been the "struggling leader" whose image would have been brandished and displayed throughout Syria in times of crisis. No longer. The Syrian flag is accompanied by the words: "God protect Syria." Bashar has decided to go with "God and Country," rather than the cult of personal or party leadership. Asadism is out. Patriotism is in. [Syria Comment]

Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon - The man who was responsible for Sabra and Chatila was a 'man of peace'. It was he who claimed that Arafat was a Palestinian bin Laden. [Palestine Chronicle]

What Hillary Clinton Doesn't Know About Palestine
Eyeless in Gilo

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA analysts

In mid-November, Hillary Clinton visited Israel and, following a meeting with Ariel Sharon, in remarks that presaged the praise being heaped on the now-comatose Sharon, began her campaign for president by praising the Israeli as a "courageous" man who had taken "an incredibly difficult" step by withdrawing from Gaza. The withdrawal, she claimed with remarkable disregard for reality, was intended as "a means of demonstrating that he is committed to trying to get back into a process" with the Palestinians. Clinton also stopped for a photo op during her trip, in what constituted an equally monumental lie. She stood on a hilltop inside the Israeli settlement of Gilo, an illegal subdivision populated by 28,000 Israelis on the southern edge of Jerusalem overlooking Bethlehem. Gilo is in occupied Palestinian territory. It was built three decades ago, illegally according to international law, on approximately 700 acres of land confiscated from Palestinian ownership. It is just inside the expanded municipal limits of Jerusalem -- boundaries that Israel redrew when it captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, then expropriated 25 square miles of Palestinian West Bank territory and annexed it, also illegally according to international law, to Israeli West Jerusalem.

Bush Wants Palestinian Polls on Time, East Jerusalem Included - President Bush believes Palestinians in Occupied East Jerusalem should be allowed to vote, said the White House spokesman. [Palestine Chronicle]

Abramoff and al-Arian: Lobbyist's "Charity" a Fron... - Abramoff and al-Arian: Lobbyist's "Charity" a Front for Terrorism Abramoff, a legendary lobbyist particularly close to DeLay, is also a fierce supporter of Israel—"a super-Zionist," one associate says. That may explain why Abramoff's paramilitary gear ended up in the town of Beitar Illit, a sprawling ultra-Orthodox outpost whose residents have occasionally tangled with their Palestinian neighbors. Yitzhak Pindrus, the settlement's mayor, says that several years ago the town was confronting mounting security problems. "They [the Palestinians] were throwing stones, they were throwing Molotov cocktails," Pindrus says. Abramoff's connection to the town was Schmuel Ben-Zvi, an American emigre who, the lobbyist told associates, was an old friend he knew from Los Angeles. Capital Athletic Foundation public tax records make no mention of Ben-Zvi. But they do show payments to "Kollel Ohel Tiferet" in Israel, a group for which there is no public listing and which the town's mayor said he never heard of. [Informed Comment]