Winter Patriot Community Blog

May 5, 2012 - Tuesday's highly secretive, midnight meeting between US President Obama and Afghan President Karzai was spun by the administration as somehow being about the end of US occupation of Afghanistan. The furtive, hurried, vague agreement signed by a deeply unpopular puppet government isolated inside multi-billion dollar US protection makes both sides look only more desperate for legitimacy. We've recounted since 2009 the story of the NATO/US "surge" of troops and cash which Obama threw at the people of Afghanistan, leading to a surge in civilian deaths, further assaults on women's rights, more night raids and anger among the people at the occupiers. This agreement extends all that until 2024!....

May 5, 2012 - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support in Iran's parliament crumbled as final results released Saturday showed conservative rivals consolidating their hold on the legislative body in a runoff vote. Iran has touted a robust turnout for Friday's vote as a show of support for the country's religious leadership in its confrontation with the West over the Islamic Republic's controversial nuclear program. The result is also a new humiliation for Ahmadinejad, whose political decline started last year with his bold but failed challenge of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the choice of intelligence chief...

May 5, 2012 - Can anyone doubt that if there were more than 1300 hunger strikers in any country in the world other than Palestine, the media in the West would be obsessed with the story? It would be featured day after day, and reported on from all angles, including the severe medical risks associated with such a lengthy refusal to take food. At this time two Palestinians who were the first to start this current wave of resistance, Thaer Halaheh and Bilal Diab, entering their 64th day without food, are reported by the prisoner protection association, Addameer, and the NGO, Physician for Human Rights-Israel, to be in critical condition with their lives hanging in the balance. Despite this dramatic state of affairs there is scant attention in Europe, and literally none in North America....

May 5, 2012 - Ramallah: Palestinian farmers with land behind the Israeli separation wall are being forced to abandon them due to the backbreaking cost of irrigating their farms using water wells. The discrepancy in costs is astounding. To irrigate their land, Palestinian farmers on the other side of the wall have to pay 130 shekels (Dh126) per cubic metre while farmers with land within the wall have to pay 40 shekels (Dh38) per cubic metre. Colonists living illegally in the West Bank have to pay only 20 shekels (Dh19) per cubic metre to irrigate their land. Palestinian farmers expect the cost to increase further given the rising price of diesel...

May 5, 2012 - Palestinians throughout the Territories face daily state terror. Prisoners in Israel's gulag are worst off. Prison harshness just increased. More on that below. An estimated 2,500 Palestinian detainees are participating in open-ended hunger strikes for justice. More join them daily. Freed prisoners got involved. On May 4, Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh refused food for the 67th day. A Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) visited them on April 30. He said Bilal risks imminent death. Thaer needs immediate civilian hospitalization for treatment prison hospitals don't provide...

May 5, 2012 - ....The drive to Iqrit takes a mere twenty minutes from my village, Fassouta. Both are in the Galilee: the north of historical Palestine, a few kilometres from the Lebanese border. During Israel's "War of Independence" in 1948, or the Nakba (Catastrophe) as Palestinians refer to it, the residents of Iqrit and Biram, another nearby village, were uprooted from their homes on "security grounds," presumably for Israel to protect its northern border. The residents of Iqrit were bussed to Rama village, twenty kilometers south in the Galilee, and told it would be for a few weeks, until the security situation was calm and they could return. But they never did. On Christmas Eve, 1950, the Israeli army blew up all the houses of Iqrit, in a timely "Christmas gift" to its expelled Christian residents....

May 5, 2012 - The latest PR catch phrase from business, administration, military, state and local officials after some atrocity or other is that whatever happened, it is certainly "not who we are," a phrase appropriately initially uttered by the Vietnam War commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, with reference to the My Lai slaughter of 400 women, children and old men, all civilians, by a group of US soldiers....Yet if all these abominations are not "who we are," then why do our business, police and military and government institutions generate so many examples of obscene, horrific or criminal behavior? If we examine the culture that guides our young men and women in battle, our public safety employees in their duties, or our business class in its pursuit of profit, it's easy to see how shameful and reprehensible episodes such as these have become as routine as they have...

May 5, 2012 - A Palestinian prisoner serving a life sentence has been held in solitary confinement for the past 10 years, receiving only one half-hour family visit. In February Judge Yonatan Avraham denied Mahmoud Issa's request for a visit from his 75-year-old mother, deeming such a visit a "great potential risk to state security." The judge's ruling was based on the Shin Bet security service's opinion and secret material he was shown. However, attorneys, activists and Issa's relatives question the reliability of the secret information used to justify his ongoing solitary confinement and that of others....

May 5, 2012 - The Times notoriously provides one-sided Israel/Palestine coverage. Jewish rights and all things Israel matter. Palestinians don't count. Times articles, commentaries, and editorials turn a blind eye to egregious violations of international laws, norms and standards. Endorsing wrong over right is policy. On April 24, a glaring example was published. The Times shares responsibility with David Horowitz's Freedom Center. With apologies to Alan Jay Lerner, his racist ad could make sailors blush. It accused the Global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement of promoting hate. It claimed it supports murdering Jewish children....

May 5, 2012 - Burnt houses, collapsed buildings and rubble line streets strewn with broken glass and spent shells in Homs' devastated neighborhoods, for months the front line in the revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. On a 10-minute drive through Baba Amr district on Thursday, as journalists accompanied United Nations truce observers, two elderly women were the only people to be seen. Buildings along the main street and nearby alleys were destroyed in the bombardment by the army... "The people of Homs don't expect much, even from the monitors. Now they are talking about dialogue - who said we want dialogue," said 24-year-old Ghanem. "We went to the street to topple Bashar al-Assad, not to talk to him." Others spoke angrily of lost homes and lost relatives...Mahmoud, 12, said many families were crammed into small quarters. "In my house we are nine people living in my house, and our house is very tiny." There is no food and no clean water, nothing. There is no shop open and we only have one meal a day. Look around you - how can we live like that and survive?"...

May 5, 2012 - ...Incredible as it sounds, more people - five times more - than those imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay by his predecessor have died in drone attacks on the watch of this president. Indeed, as the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen puts it, drones have become the coin of Obama's realm. The man who voted against the Iraq war and questioned the "dark side" of the neocon wars lost little time in embracing the same worldview. And now his counterterrorism honcho John O' Brennan has the audacity to claim that the use of pilotless planes to kill the usual suspects and everyone in the vicinity without giving them time and a chance to explain and defend themselves is perfectly "legal, ethical, proportional and saves American lives." Even international law, argues Brennan, allows America to do what it well pleases!...

May 5, 2012 - ...And there lies the rub for Pakistan. The entire burden of blame for any turbulence in the post-2014 Afghanistan will surely be put on the shoulders of Pakistan by the Americans and their allies alike. An inkling of things in the coming can indeed be had from the way they had reacted to the Taliban's spring offensive in Kabul and other places only a few days ago. Although for some time the US generals maintained that they had no hard evidence to suggest if the offensive was planned by the Haqqani network in its "sanctuaries" in Pakistan's tribal areas, the patently inspired reports and commentaries in the American media had started saying that it was planned there the moment the Taliban's offensive ensued....But the most worrying part is that Pakistan is not prepared to withstand the likely US onslaught either economically or politically...

May 5, 2102 - Ramallah: Three ancient West Bank pools amid rocks are in danger of being seized by neighbouring Israeli colonists. The Israelis living in the colony of Alfae Manachie are planning to take over the pools by force or by offering money to buy the land or rent it for a century.The pools which date back to the Byzantine era are located in villages including Kufr Thelth, Ezbat Al Ashqar, Saniriyah and Al Mudawar of the Salfit Governorate....

May 5, 2012 -- The condition of a protester injured in Friday clashes near Ofer prison has worsened, medics said on Saturday. Musa al-Shuani, 21, was sent to intensive care and his condition was described as serious. Al-Shuani, a student at Bir Zeit university, was shot in the eye with a rubber bullet on Friday. He is the leader of an Islamic student group at the university...

May 5, 2012 - Resorting to a combination of legal tricks, repeated procrastination and brazen deceitfulness, the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu has been trying to legalise dozens of colonial outposts built on private Arab lands. The manifestly malicious measures have raised the eyebrows of jurists and judges as well as media figures in Israel who have complained that the Netanyahu government is not only destroying the peace process with the Palestinians but also the rule of law in Israel....

May 4, 2012 - Amnesty International today issued a call for urgent action from individuals around the world to contact Israeli authorities about Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, two Palestinians men who are at immediate risk of death on their 67th day of hunger strike. Both are being held without charge or trial by Israel. Amnesty's call for Urgent Action begins: Two Palestinian hunger strikers' lives are in danger, as the Israeli Supreme Court has delayed ruling on the appeal against their detention without charge or trial. Other administrative detainees on hunger strike are still denied access to independent doctors....

May 5, 2012 - Two injuries were reported, and dozens of cases of gas inhalation, when Israeli troops attacked non-violent solidarity protests in six Palestinian villages in the central and southern West Bank.This week, the weekly Friday protests (held in villages located on the path of the Israeli wall) were in solidarity with Palestinian political detainees on hunger strike protesting ill-treatment and the use of administrative detention policies by their Israeli captives...

May 5, 2012 - At least 10 people were killed and one was injured in a US drone strike early Saturday morning in Pakistan's northwest tribal area of North Waziristan, reported local Urdu TV channel Express. According to local media reports, two missiles were fired by US drones at a house suspected of being a militants' hideout in the Darai Nashtar area of North Waziristan which borders Afghanistan. Four US drones were seen flying over the area following the attack. Rescue work was delayed due to fear of further strikes by the US drones, said local media...

May 4, 2012 - Friday ended with the death of 46 martyrs. 13 martyrs were reported in Damascus, 8 in Idlib, 7 in Daraa, 6 in Hama, 5 in Homs, 4 in Aleppo, 2 in Deir Ezzor, and 1 in the Damascus Suburbs.... Aleppo: Andan: Execution of a family composed of a husband, wife and and their son after their home in Sukari Neighborhood in Aleppo was stormed and Shabiha murdered them, the martyrs are Mostafa Bakri Zareeq, his wife Fatima Arour and their son Ahmad Zareeq... Idlib: Jabal Al-Zawiyeh: The corpses of three martyrs were found on the road between Joseph and Ibleen. They had died under torture after their arrest several days ago at the Center for Environmental Development in Ibleen, which was transformed into a detention center...Damascus: Tadamun: Seven martyrs are reported thus far in the area and many wounded as a result of security forces storming it amid heavy gunfire and a campaign of random arrests...Damascus: Kafar Soseh: Five martyrs were reported in the neighborhood, in addition to many wounded, including serious injuries, as a result of gunfire by security forces at the funeral of the martyr Adi Jenblat...