Winter Patriot Community Blog

April 25, 2012 - On 17 April 2012, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons launched a mass hunger strike demanding an end to administrative detention, isolation and other punitive measures taken against Palestinian prisoners including the denial of family visits and access to university education. Approximately 1,200 Palestinian prisoners from all factions began an open hunger strike on 17 April, with the campaign gaining further momentum over this past week and additional prisoners joining daily...

April 25, 2012 - On 30 March 2012, Palestinians around the world marked Land Day, commemorating the 1976 killing of 6 Palestinians protesting against land confiscation by the Israeli authorities. Across occupied Palestine, thousands of civilians held peaceful protests, which were responded to with excessive use of force by Israeli occupation forces. In the Gaza Strip, one civilian protester, Mahmoud Mohammed Zaqout, 19, was killed, and 38 others were wounded, including 16 children. In similar protests throughout the West Bank, 25 civilians, including 2 children, were wounded...

April 25, 2012 - NATO says that two service members have been killed in separate attacks in southern Afghanistan, while two others have died of non-battle injuries. The coalition said in statements that one service member was killed by an improvised explosive device Wednesday and another by a similar weapon on Tuesday. NATO said the two other service members died of non-battle injuries, one in the south on Wednesday and another in the east on Tuesday...

April 25, 2012 - Historical memory is a touchy subject for much of Israel's highly nationalistic population. Many critics, such as Dr. Yousef Natsheh, believe the government "uses history for political ends."Dr. Natsheh, who works in the Islamic archaeology department at al Aqsa Mosque, contends that the state is "trying to marginalise any other history [than their own]," which he describes as "exclusive... focusing on certain areas and neglecting others." "There is a general attempt in Israel to erase Palestinian history," agrees Oren Yiftachel, a scholar of Israeli ethnocentrism at Ben Gurion University. The state's founding myth of conquest and independence has been meticulously trimmed of incriminating narratives, to be inculcated in the population from an early age...

April 25, 2012 - In a striking omission to mainstream coverage of the Afghan massacre which took the lives of 17 Afghans including many children, one as young as two, the AP has reported that US soldiers came to their villages after a roadside bombing two days before and promised retaliation. The Pentagon has denied that any bombing took place, putting it in direct contradiction to the attorney for Sgt. Robert Bales, who alone is being accused of the rampage..

April 18, 2012 - Beit Hanina - Wednesday morning, a Palestinian family of 11, the Natche family, was evicted from their home in Beit Hanina (Hebrew report). The legal process behind the eviction was launched by Aryeh King, the head of a group known as "The Israel Lands Fund." Their claim to the property was based, like in the cases in Sheikh Jarrah, on land deeds held by Jews before 1948....

April 18, 2012 - Beit Hanina - Wednesday morning, a Palestinian family of 11, the Natche family, was evicted from their home in Beit Hanina (Hebrew report). The legal process behind the eviction was launched by Aryeh King, the head of a group known as "The Israel Lands Fund." Their claim to the property was based, like in the cases in Sheikh Jarrah, on land deeds held by Jews before 1948....

April 18, 2012 - A Palestinian woman was shot and injured by Israeli fire in the southern Gaza Strip Wednesday morning, medical officials said. The 27-year-old Rinad Qudeih was hit by a gunshot to the head when Israeli soldiers stationed in military towers opened fire near the southern Gaza Strip. Qudeih was working in her family's field when she sustained a superficial wound in the head, witnesses said. She was evacuated to the military hospital in Abasan village east of Khan Younis...

April 18, 2012 - The CIA is officially seeking authority to expand its covert drone war in Yemen by assassinating individuals even when their identities are not known in a move that would codify what appears to already be current practice. The agency's director, David H. Petraeus, has requested permission to employ the tactic used in Pakistan for years called "signature strikes." This would allow the CIA to launch drone missiles targeting groups of people exhibiting "suspicious behavior," a loosely-defined judgement that would give the agency carte blanche to kill whoever it pleases in Yemen...

April 18, 2012 - Kabul was cast into chaos Sunday as the Taliban began their spring offensive with attacks on US, British, German and Russian embassies, NATO headquarters, Camp Eggers, a hotel, President Karzai's palace compound and parliament. "These are coordinated attacks that went just as we planned," Taliban spokesman Qari Talha told The Daily Beast. "This is only the start of what's in store this year and next for the Americans and Karzai." Targets across the country included Vice-President Mohammad Karim Khalili, airfields and police stations in three eastern provinces. About 20 insurgents were killed in the attacks, which injured at least 15 police officers and nine civilians...

April 18, 2012. Chaos and violence continue, US officials visit the region, a US official may have engaged in sex in a public place in Iraq, that US official may have been someone Barack Obama's currently nominating for a major appointment, the political crisis continues, suicides and 'suicides' plague Iraq, and more...

April 18, 2012 - Israeli soldiers and policemen displaced resident Khaled An-Natsha and his family from their home in Al-Ashqariyya area, in Beit Hanina, north of Israeli controlled East Jerusalem. The eviction came following a court order that granted Israeli settlers ownership over the property. The Palestinian News and Info Agency, WAFA, reported that the soldiers also detained An-Natsha after "arguing with the soldiers". The Israeli District Court in Jerusalem previously issued an eviction notice ordering An-Natsha to vacate the property, claiming that the land on which his home is built belonged to a Jewish man since 1936....

April 18, 2012 - America's Afghan war is lost and illegal. The Bush administration got no Security Council authorization or congressional declaration of war. International law expert Francis Boyle said Congress passed a War Powers Resolution Authorization. Doing so gave Bush "blank check" power "to use military force against any individual, organization, or state" at his discretion. International and constitutional law be damned. Waging war on Afghanistan "is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan."...

April 18, 2012 - Yaara Bou Melhem gets rare access to see what life is really like in Libya after Gaddafi, as heavily armed rebels remain largely in control of a country in chaos...

April 18, 2012 - When did we decide that it was okay to treat very young school children as if they were terror suspects? When I was growing up, I don't remember a single time that the police ever came to my school and arrested anyone. But now police are being called out to public schools at the drop of a hat. All over America, very young school children are being arrested and marched out of their schools in handcuffs in front of all their friends. For example, down in Georgia the other day police were called out because a 6-year-old girl was throwing a tantrum. The police subdued her, slapped handcuffs on her and hauled her off to the police station. Instead of apologizing for this outrageous incident, the police are defending the actions of the officer involved. But this is not an isolated incident. All over the country young kids are being handcuffed and mistreated by police...

April 18, 2012 - "When someone asks me what my identity is, I answer that first and foremost, I am a Palestinian Arab with Arab roots and then last comes my Christian religion," Dr. Anton Shuhaibar, a physician in his sixties, said as he sat playing chess with a friend at the YMCA in Gaza City on the eve of Orthodox Easter, which occurred last Sunday. Shuhaibar has lived in Gaza City's al-Zaytoun neighborhood along with others who share his faith, for several decades. There are three churches in Gaza including Orthodox and Baptist places of worship, but the vast majority of Gaza's estimated 3,000 Christians are Roman Catholic...

April 18, 2012 - Spending a week in Israel these days is like being trapped within a scene from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Like Jack Nicholson in the lead role of that classic film, you might not be insane but the doctors and nurses who run the psychiatric ward manufacture every few minutes a collective hysteria to keep everyone in the grip of fear and hatred. Everyone is an enemy, every a visitor an existential threat. A retired French activist in her sixties - part of the most recent Welcome to Palestine fly-in - is met in the airport by a military brigade and massive police force that left much of Israel at the mercy of its petty criminals who had a field day while the officers of the law went to arrest the invading aliens who came from Europe....

April 18, 2012 - The recent decision by the Taliban and one of its allies to withdraw from peace talks with Washington underlines the train wreck the U.S. is headed for in Afghanistan. Indeed, for an administration touted as sophisticated and intelligent, virtually every decision the White House has made vis-a'-vis Afghanistan has been a disaster. On Mar. 15 the Taliban ended preliminary talks with Washington, because, according to a spokesman for the insurgent organization, the Americans were being "shaky, erratic and vague." The smaller Hizb-i-Islami group followed two weeks later....

April 18, 2012 - On Saturday March 31, I was delighted to be asked to speak at a demonstration outside the US Embassy marking the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who vanished with her three children in Karachi on March 30, 2003. It took nearly five and a half years until she reappeared in Afghanistan, where she was arrested by Afghan soldiers, and where, after apparently trying and failing to shoot at the US soldiers to whose custody she had been transferred, she was flown to the United States - rendered, one might say - where she was tried in New York, and, in September 2010, sentenced to 86 years in prison...