Winter Patriot Community Blog

April 8, 2012 - Benghazi residents on Friday staged a huge demonstration, demanding an end to what they called 'the city's militarization'. PANA reports that the demonstrators also called for the dissolution of militias and other military groups. They said Libyan militias should return the arms they used during the Libyan crisis and get themselves integrated into Libyan forces by the Interior and Defence ministries with a view to contributing to efforts to rebuild the Libyan state. They carried placards some of which read "Neither militias nor brigades, we want united army under the same flag'; and 'We will rather die than live under militias'...

April 8, 2012 - The Zionists occupation filled it with settlements, stole its land, killed its children, surrounded its Mosque and dismembered the city to control more than 65% of its area. That is how the land of the district of al-Khalil was divided between Jewish settlements and occupation military bases. An expert in settlement Abdul Hadi Hantash told PIC: "Al-Khalil is, deeply and clearly, suffering from the onslaught of settlement in the year 2012 and I expect that settlements in the district will expand by 30% while they expanded last year by 20% . Thus, the number of settlement units will be doubled". He also explained that the policy of adding mobile homes in many outposts in the district is a part of a larger plan that aims at installing more settlement outposts....

April 8, 2012 - On April 3, 2012, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) for the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its decision on the situation in Palestine, stating that is unable to proceed with its preliminary examination at this time. The decision came over three years after Palestine submitted a declaration under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute of the ICC in order to trigger the jurisdiction of the Court as a non-party state to the Statute. The basis for this decision is that it did not have the authority to determine whether Palestine was a "state" for the purposes of the Rome Statute, but that it was for the 'relevant bodies' at the United Nations or the ICC Assembly of States Parties to make that legal determination....

April 8, 2012 - The Israeli occupation authority (IOA) renewed the house arrest on 70-year-old Palestinian journalist and human rights activist Abdul Latif Ghaith. Palestinian sources in occupied Jerusalem said on Sunday that the IOA summoned family of Ghaith, who is one of the founders of Dameer institution for human rights, and told them that his travel ban to the West Bank was extended for another six months. They said that the order was issued by the Israeli military commander of the West Bank...

April 8, 2012 - In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement. Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."...

April 8, 2012 - As we write this piece, more than 5,300 Palestinians are imprisoned in Israeli jails. Zero Israelis are imprisoned in Palestinian jails. A total of 24,813 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since 1967. Zero Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians since then. Some 172 Jewish-only settlements and 101 "outposts" have been erected on confiscated Palestinian land. Zero Palestinian settlements exist on any Israeli land. These facts and many like them make clear that what is happening in Israel and the Palestinian territories is not simply a "conflict." It's a decades-long colonial campaign led by the Israeli military that aims to disenfranchise the indigenous race and to purify the land of non-Jews by implementing an apartheid system...

April 8, 2012 - Naomi Desmond Tutu, daughter of the leader and activist against the apartheid regime in South Africa, said that the experience of Palestinians are similar to that of the South African's experiences of racism during the reign of the apartheid regime in the previous century. Tito told PNN, during her visit to Bethlehem with the coordination of the American consul in Jerusalem, "Holy Land Trust" institution and the Holy Bible College hosted Tutu, who visited Palestine to share the experience of her Nation in South Africa in General and her personal experience in particular and to exchange experiences and experiments with Palestinians...

April 8, 2012 - Ahmed Mostafa and his friends paid thousands of dollars among them to get to Libya recently, traveling with gangs of smugglers through Western Africa. It was to be their escape from the sprawling slums of Ghana's capital city, Accra. Mostafa had heard rumors of arbitrary arrests and Libyan lynch mobs during the war last year in which longtime Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi was ousted and killed. But he was counting on luck: "It was not something I really thought about," he said. "I thought I would come and secure some work. Then send some money to my family."....

April 8, 2012 - The sensational video of Izzat al-Duri released yesterday on the occasion of the 65 year anniversary of the Baath party isn't getting quite the airplay it deserves. Not that the content of the hour-long speech in itself is particularly interesting, but the sheer fact that, despite rumours of ill health, the most senior Baath leader to survive the Iraq War is confirmed to be alive and well is an important development. This is, after all, the person seen as the rightful successor to Saddam Hussein by the remaining Baath party faithful. Additionally, towards the end of the speech, Duri reveals some interesting perspectives on the broader regional situation that provide clues as to this possible whereabouts, which for a long time has been something of a riddle. First of all: It looks real...

April 8, 2012 - The news broke last night that Palestinian activist Sheikh Raed Salah had won his appeal against deportation from the UK in the Upper Tier (Immigration) Tribunal in London. My full story will be published on EI soon, including new revelations about the case, and its implications for the government's Prevent "anti-terrorism" strategy. Meanwhile, here is the judge's decision (a scan of the full document is forthcoming, but this extract is essentially the bottom line). It is an important ruling. You'll note in paragraph 90 that the judge Mark Ockelton even says of the ban ("exclusion order") which Home Secretary Theresa May secretly imposed on Salah that there is now "no lawful basis" for it to be implemented. This is important, as the appeal was against the deportation, not the banning order...

April 8, 2012 - One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files. No search warrant is needed for any of this. No oversight exists. And there are no apparent constraints on what the U.S. Government can do with regard to whom it decides to target or why....

April 8, 2012 - ...The truth is that the Syrian people are getting a taste of what Palestinians have been enduring for the best part of a century: futile Arab League summits; empty, toothless rhetoric by kings and sheikhs; lip service from the "international community"; crocodile tears; and a horribly feckless and reactionary political leadership that lags light years behind the rebellious youth. Moreover, both Palestinians and Syrians have been blessed with the all-important contribution of Kofi Annan, the undisputed master of equating between victims and executioners, an expert at calling for sham "peace" between the oppressor and oppressed amidst carnage and bloody repression. It's worth noting, however, that I'm perfectly aware of the significant differences between the Syrian and Palestinian situations. Palestinians have been struggling for over six decades against an expansionist settler-colonial military occupation erected upon physical and psychological walls, separation fences, and military checkpoints, maintained by the lethal combination of the military-industrial complex and deeply-entrenched institutional racism that penetrates the whole of society. Syrians are fighting a fascist, totalitarian ruling elite that has turned Syria into a private property of the Assad clan and their beneficiaries. That elite class, under Assad's dominating influence, has acted exactly like an occupation force with a similar lack of legitimacy....

April 8, 2012 - Al-Zaytouna Centre marks the Palestinian Child Day by reminding its readers of its book on The Suffering of the Palestinian Child under the Israeli Occupation. It is available for free download in both Arabic and English. A Fact File is also available to show the violations of the Palestinian child's most basic human rights, and how much these children are harmed, mistreated and even killed. This book is about the various dimensions of the suffering of the Palestinian children under the Israeli occupation. These children whose basic rights are conitnuously violated, and whose psychological, health, educational, and social status is most alarming; all in a concise, simple, academic and interactive style....

April 8, 2012 - For decades, cities all over the country have worked to essentially criminalize homelessness, instituting measures that outlaw holding a sign, sleeping, sitting, lying (or weirdly, telling a lie in Orlando) if you live on the street. Where the law does not mandate outright harassment, police come up with clever work-arounds, like destroying or confiscating tents, blankets and other property in raids of camps. A veteran I talked to, his eye bloody from when some teenagers beat him up to steal 60 cents, said police routinely extracted the poles from his tent and kept them so he couldn't rebuild it. (Where are all the pissed-off libertarians and conservatives at such flagrant disrespect for private property?)...

April 8, 2012 - The leaders of the Libyan city of Misrata could be held criminally responsible for ongoing serious crimes by forces under their command, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the city's military and civilian leaders. They could be held responsible by authorities that include the International Criminal Court (ICC), Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch highlighted the ongoing torture and abuse in detention facilities in and around Misrata and continued arrests, torture, and forced displacement of people from the nearby town of Tawergha. These abuses appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said....

April 8, 2012 - Bahrain has rejected the Danish government's request to transfer a jailed activist who has spent two months on hunger strike to Denmark for emergency treatment, the kingdom's official news agency said. Abdulhadi al-Khawaja once lived in Denmark and has Danish citizenship. He is serving a life sentence for his role in last year's uprising by the Shia majority against a Western-backed Sunni monarchy, and has been refusing food since 8 February.

April 7, 2012 - On Saturday, 127 people were martyred in Syria. 59 martyrs fell in Hama, 28 martyrs fell in Homs, 24 martyrs fell in Idlib, 14 martyrs fell in aleppo Suburbs, and 1 martyr fell in each of Dara and Douma in Damascus Suburbs.Aleppo: Heryaten: 8 people were martyred due to the brutal shelling on the city. The known martyrs are: Osama Abdulrahman Al-Alo, Hani Ghazi, Adbulrahman Abdulhai and Osama Aqraa... Hama: Latmaneh: The estimated number of victims of the massacre that was committed this morning is 50, of which 36 martyrs have already been identified, while many others remain under the debris. The regime's army had surrounded the town at dawn and started violently and randomly shelling it, demolishing entire buildings on top of their owners. After 2 hours of shelling, regime forces entered the town, opening random fire on anything that moved.

April 7, 2012 - "You know things ain't right," writes Gazan Laila El-Haddad in a 2005 blog, "when a child has become so accustomed to warplanes that he confuses them with birds." (p. 35) Her one-year-old son Yusuf has just identified an Israeli warplane flying overhead to bomb Khan Yunis, as a jaja, a chicken. Leaving aside the aptness of Yusuf's observation - aerial bombardment could indeed be called "chicken" in the sense of cowardly - El-Haddad's blog from Gaza since 2004 (originally Raising Yusuf and then Gaza Mom) excels in marrying the everyday with the surreal and the domestic with the political, moving from anxiety about Yusuf's toilet training to her own panic attacks from incessant Israeli sonic booms to chaos in Gaza's streets. And meanwhile, Yusuf decides on his own greatest object of fear: not warplanes, but the lowly vacuum cleaner....

April 7, 2012- After receiving several e-mails forwarding bitter attacks against Finkelstein for his pronouncements at several colleges and in private interviews during his recent lecture tour in UK, I read, in full, the posts sent to me. I then hunted out several reports and videos about Finkelstein's UK lecture tour and, though it took hours spread over several days, read all the reports and saw all the videos. It became clear to me that the attacks on Finkelstein were based on the single 30 minute interview he gave to a private person in the confines of a small private room. I feel that if those on the attack had heard the long and detailed speeches Finkelstein gave to large audiences in University Halls and at other places, they would change their mind. I find that Finkelstein has not changed a bit on fundamentals...