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Big_Bird

Joined: 31 Jan 2003 Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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Posted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:27 pm Post subject: The War on Children |
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http://www.newstatesman.com/200606190029
The New Statesman wrote: |
two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children.
This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month.
Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January. The majority voted for the "wrong" party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had reaffirmed Hamas's commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and respect the borders of 1967. Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem. |
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Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable. For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, "Two-thirds of the 621 children . . . killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints . . . on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound." A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The Israeli wall "will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve."
The study described "a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The sol-diers refused." |
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In April, in British-occupied Basra, the European aid agency Saving Children from War reported: "The mortality of young children had increased by 30 per cent compared with the Saddam Hussein era." They die because the hospitals have no ventilators and the water supply, which the British were meant to have fixed, is more polluted than ever. Children fall victim to unexploded US and British cluster bombs. They play in areas contaminated by depleted uranium; by contrast, British army survey teams venture there only in full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. Unlike the children they came to "liberate", British troops are given what the Ministry of Defence calls "full biological testing". |
We are all b astards when we turn a blind eye to all this. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Posted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:35 pm Post subject: |
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what about palestinians in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt?
And turn a blind eye towards Palestine and Israel? My god, is there anything that gets more coverage than that conflict? How many people does it affect? A few million tops? How many NGOs are devoted to the cause? How many resources are poured into bringing resolution to the conflict?
Sorry, I'm a little cynical about that conflict. I don't think I can have any impact from here in the States. Write to congress? eh yeah, like that'll do anything.
my one contribution towards Iraq: giving money to Madre, a NGO that is helping women in Iraq. |
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Big_Bird

Joined: 31 Jan 2003 Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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Posted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:37 pm Post subject: |
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bucheon bum wrote: |
what about palestinians in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt?
And turn a blind eye towards Palestine and Israel? My god, is there anything that gets more coverage than that conflict? How many people does it affect? A few million tops? How many NGOs are devoted to the cause? How many resources are poured into bringing resolution to the conflict?
Sorry, I'm a little cynical about that conflict. I don't think I can have any impact from here in the States. Write to congress? eh yeah, like that'll do anything.
my one contribution towards Iraq: giving money to Madre, a NGO that is helping women in Iraq. |
You can talk to people and raise awareness. You might not do any good. But you might be the butterfly that causes a ripple in the air and starts a hurricane. |
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deadman
Joined: 27 May 2006 Location: Suwon
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Posted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 9:05 pm Post subject: |
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bucheon bum wrote: |
what about palestinians in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt?
And turn a blind eye towards Palestine and Israel? My god, is there anything that gets more coverage than that conflict? How many people does it affect? A few million tops? |
It affects everyone in the US as long as there are powerful social taboos preventing the open discussion of the ethics involved as befits a mature and reaponsible democracy
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How many NGOs are devoted to the cause? How many resources are poured into bringing resolution to the conflict? |
I wonder how those resources compare to the resources poured in to resolve the conflict exactly as the Israelis want (significant compromise doesn't seem to be an option).
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my one contribution towards Iraq: giving money to Madre, a NGO that is helping women in Iraq. |
I don't do anything, so: respect.
Big_Bird wrote: |
You can talk to people and raise awareness. |
And help to remove those taboos. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005 Location: Easy Street.
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Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 1:10 am Post subject: |
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Judging by reactions on this forum the biggest obstacle to rational debate on Israel-Palestine in the US is a vehement hatred of Palestinians. People seem to think they have no right to exist. You'd think Americans would be quite disengaged from a conflict so remote but people get passionate about it. In one way I feel genuinely at a loss to understand it - but in another way it's all too clear the reason people rabidly attack Palestinians is because we're dealing with The Holy Land and The Children of Israel. |
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