100 000 demonstrerade i Alexandria idag

I bakgrunden Cecil Hotel, där Lawrence Durrell skrev sin Alexandriakvartett

och Cornischen med medelhavet och östra hamnen.

Svenska Institutet ligger ett par kvarter bakom hotellet.

Visst! Gaza är måhända skottet i Sarajevo.

Presshuset i Gaza City där BBC, Jazeera, Press TV och de få andra kanaler med
reportrar på plats har träffats för ett par timmar sedan av en missil. En
fotograf skadades. Mafiafasoner. Bort med vittnet. De bryr sig tydligen föga
om någon opinion. Matchen är riggad. Allting andas panik. Djingis Khan är tillbaka.

Sist han var där, om mina historiska kunskaper stämmer, krossades
hans dröm om världsherravälde just vid Palestinas port, och han fick nöja
sig med att dö som alla andra. Och Palestina överlevde honom.

En strid ström av sårade och lik transporteras till al-Shifa-sjukhuset i ambulanser som

riskerar livet för varje transport. 21 läkare och ambulansförare har hittills mist livet.

En far på sjukhuset gråter framför Jazeeras kamera. Hans son, 13 år gammal, ligger

på operationsbordet med öppen mage. En missil träffade honom i buken. Deras

hus rasade och alla flydde, utan pengar, med bara kläderna på. Han vet inte var

resten av familjen är just nu. "Vad har min son gjort för att förtjäna detta?"

säger han och vänder sig från kameran med tårar i ögonen.

En mor har legat död i fyra dar med sina traumatiserade ungar intill sig. i FYRA

dagar förvägrades ambulanserna fri passage för att hämta liket

och ungarna. Läkarna arbetar dygnet runt och hinner inte med alla.

Av de 3125 sårade är 400 kritiska fall.

Det lär höja dödssiffran med några hundra till, förutom de som inte

räknats än och som ligger bland ruinerna.

Gaza lider. Gaza korsfästs för att ha vågat utmana herrefolket

och kräva sin rätt att vara. Därför måste Gaza förintas.

Så tänkte Djingis Khan, så tänkte Alexander, så tänkte Timur Lenk,

så tänkte Bonaparte och alla andra som har försökt lägga beslag

på Palestina. De förintade städer och utplånade folk och brände jorden

för att visa sin makt och hålla sig med slavar. Gaza är vår tids slavuppror.

Ljuset i vårt svarta hål.

Tack för breven! Det blir demonstration i Malmö också lördagen 10/1,

från Gustav Adolfs torg kl 14, arrangerad av Palestinska föreningen m fl.

Se övriga orter och tider i Sverige längst ner.

Med vänliga hälsningar till alla Alhambravänner
Rolf Björnson

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765 döda och 3125 sårade på 12 dagar!

Kokpunkten är nådd...













i varenda huvudstad



















från Kairo

till Västbanken

och över hela världen

ropar miljoner människor

STOPPA MASSAKERN I GAZA - BRYT BLOCKADEN

Lördagen den 10 januari demonstreras till stöd för Gaza
på en rad orter i Sverige.

STOCKHOLM lördagen den 10/1 kl 13.00 på Sergels torg.
Demonstrationen går till Israels ambassad.

BORÅS lördagarna den 10/1 och 17/1 kl 12.00 på Stora torget

GÖTEBORG lördagen den 10/1 kl 14.00 på Götaplatsen

HALMSTAD lördagen den 10/1 kl 12.00 på Stora torget

LUND lördagen den 10/1 kl 12.00 på Stortorget

NORRKÖPING lördagen den 10/1 kl 12.00
Avgång från Tyska torget mot Hörsalsparken.

VÄSTERÅS lördagen den 10/1 kl 13.00 på Fiskartorget-Sigmatorget

ÖREBRO lördagen den 10/1 kl 13 utanför Skattehuset

MALMÖ, lördagen 10/1, från Gustav Adolfs torg kl 14

Två mkt korta men viktiga filmer / Demonstrationer över hela landet lördag 10e

En liten palestinsk flicka ställer oss några frågor (engelsk text)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac5ir0CJOXE&feature=related

F.d. israelisk militär ställer några frågor till Obama



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfnPjzOGB5s

Tack Hesham vill också jag säga för all information du förser oss med. I så många år har Israels ockupation av Västbanken, militära övergrepp och stulen mark inte minst till nya bosättningar plågat våra sinnen men också rubbat tilliten till det mänskliga demokratiska tänkandet. Hur kan man överhuvudtaget avvisa förhandlingar med en demokratiskt vald grupp! Det är ofattbart. Ända sedan de dagar vi såg Hebronmassakern och blockaden av hamnen i Accaba från Jordaniens sida och förstod att vi undanhållits viktig information, har vi försökt "läsa" den information som står oss tillbuds så kritiskt som möjligt, men det är svårt att undvika att bli lurad. Inte minst därför att du också kan läsa arabiska texter blir din information extra viktig.

Extra tack för att du skickar ett forum för protest.

Gunnel

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Erdogan sa idag: Jag talar inte som premiärminister i vilken stat som helst! Jag är barnbarn till Ottomanska Riket som tog emot er när ni utsattes för orättvisor och gav er ett hem när ni fördrevs… det som ni gör i Gaza i dag kommer historieböckerna att ställa er till svars för. Det ni gör mot Gazaborna kommer att bli en svartfläck i mänsklighetens historia! (Ur Rawia Morras blogg http://rawiamorra.se/ )

Ett brev från Frankrike

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Good morning,

I won't bother you further but I wished to send you hereunder the letter communicated by L Michael Hager to the Washington Post after receiving my text and our exchanges. It was published yesterday.

I imagine that, in the absence of a full military protection of the civilian population of Gaza, for instance by the Arab air and naval forces or by international forces, it is international and internal (in Israel) pressure that impacts a bit on the criminal policy of this rogue State. I am not convinced that the immediate priority is supporting the population with money; but with the arms of law and media; or arms tout court as said Victor Hugo in his poem on L'enfant de Chios "the child of Chios". It is a pity that I could today begin this poem as follows:

"Les Israeliens ont passé là. Tout est ruine et deuil." and continue: "Bel enfant, que te faut-il donner
Pour rattacher gaîment et gaîment ramener en boucles sur ta blanche épaule? (...) Que veux-tu ? fleur, beau fruit, ou l'oiseau merveilleux ?
- Ami, dit l'enfant Palestinien, dit l'enfant aux yeux verts,
Je veux de la poudre et des balles. "

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Grov översättning av Victor Hugos dikt i sin nya tappning:

"Israelerna har varit här. Allt är ruiner och sorg.
Du vackra barn ... Vad vill du? En blomma, en härlig frukt eller den fantastiska fågeln?
- Min vän, svarade det palestinska barnet, barnet med de gröna ögonen.
Jag vill ha krut och gevärskulor."

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BEGIN TEXT in the Washington Post

Wednesday, January 7, 2009; Page A14

On the Jan. 2 op-ed page, Charles Krauthammer ["Moral Clarity in Gaza"] lauded the "moral scrupulousness of Israel," while Michael Gerson ["Defining Victory for Israel"] asserted: "There is no question -- none -- that Israel's attack on Hamas is justified."

Portraying the Israelis as victims ignores the fact that Israel has unleashed overwhelming force against a densely populated area in which the inhabitants have been under virtual siege for months. Were the United States under a similar blockade, who would decry the deployment of rockets against the blockaders?

Collective punishments leveled against a civilian population violate international law and deserve universal condemnation. The U.S. government should not only distance itself from Israel's reprehensible actions but should also use its diplomatic clout to secure a cease-fire and broker a sustainable peace.

L. MICHAEL HAGER

Washington

The writer is a former director of the International Development Law Organization in Rome.

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Sorry I forgot to add that Children of Gaza need also urgent medical treatment. My sister in law (a Canadian Palestinian) and her sister are working closely with the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (www.pcrf.net). Please go to their website to learn more. Let me quote her: "This organization is non-political and one of the most effective medical support groups out there. ... The idea is to raise funds and provide as much medical support and attention to the children at the heart of this conflict. The PCRF does brilliant work and has treated thousands of children in Palestine, but also in Iraq and Lebanon. Today the focus is primarily the children of Gaza. We are hoping to get as many of the injured children as possible treated immediately." Do not hesitate to share this info around you as I will here in France.

Alex

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Robert Fisk:

Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-do-they-hate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html

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STOPPA MASSAKERN I GAZA - BRYT BLOCKADEN

Lördagen den 10 januari demonstreras till stöd för Gaza
på en rad orter i Sverige.

STOCKHOLM lördagen den 10/1 kl 13.00 på Sergels torg.
Demonstrationen går till Israels ambassad.

BORÅS lördagarna den 10/1 och 17/1 kl 12.00 på Stora torget

GÖTEBORG lördagen den 10/1 kl 14.00 på Götaplatsen

HALMSTAD lördagen den 10/1 kl 12.00 på Stora torget

LUND varje lördag kl 12.00 på Stortorget

NORRKÖPING lördagen den 10/1 kl 12.00
Avgång från Tyska torget mot Hörsalsparken.

VÄSTERÅS lördagen den 10/1 kl 13.00 på Fiskartorget-Sigmatorget

ÖREBRO lördagen den 10/1 kl 13 utanför Skattehuset

By Hashem Said

I am Israel
By Hashem Said
The Daily - Washington State University

I am Israel - I came to a land without a people for a people without a land. Those people who happened to be here, had no right to be here, and my people showed them they had to leave or die, razing 480 Palestinian villages to the ground, erasing their history.

I am Israel - some of my people committed massacres and later became Prime Ministers to represent me. In 1948, Menachem Begin was in charge of the unit that slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, including 100 men, women, and children. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982 arranged for our allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.

I am Israel - carved in 1948 out of 78% of the land of Palestine, dispossessing its inhabitants and replacing them with Jews from Europe and other parts of the world.

While the natives whose families lived on this land for thousands of years are not allowed to return, Jews from all over the world are welcome to instant citizenship.

I am Israel - in 1967, I swallowed the remaining lands of Palestine - the West Bank and Gaza - and placed their inhabitants under an oppressive military rule, controlling and humiliating every aspect of their daily lives. Eventually, they should get the message that they are not welcome to stay, and join the millions of Palestinian refugees in the shanty camps of Lebanon and Jordan.

I am Israel - I have the power to control American policy. My American Israel Public Affairs Committee can make or break any politician of its choosing, and as you see, they all compete to please me. All the forces of the world are powerless against me, including the UN as I have the American veto to block any condemnation of my war crimes. As Sharon so eloquently phrased it, "We control America ".

I am Israel - I influence American mainstream media too, and you will always find the news tailored to my favor. I have invested millions of dollars into PR representation, and CNN, New York Times, and others have been doing an excellent job of promoting my propaganda. Look at other international news sources and you will see the difference.

I am Israel - and you Palestinians want to negotiate "peace!?" But you are not as smart as me; I will negotiate, but will only let you have your municipalities while I control your borders, your water, your airspace, and anything else of importance. While we "negotiate," I will swallow your hilltops and fill them with settlements, populated by the most extremist of my extremists, armed to the teeth. These settlements will be connected with roads you cannot use, and you will be imprisoned in your little Bantustans between them, surrounded by checkpoints in every direction.

I am Israel - with the fourth strongest army in the world, possessing nuclear weapons. How dare your children confront my oppression with stones, don't you know my soldiers won't hesitate to blow their heads off? In 17 months, I have killed 900 of you and injured 17,000, mostly civilians, and have the mandate to continue since the international community remains silent. Ignore, as I do, the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who are now refusing to carry out my control over your lands and people; their voices of conscience will not protect you.

I am Israel - and you want freedom? I have bullets, tanks, missiles, Apaches, and F-16's, to obliterate you. I have placed your towns under siege, confiscated your lands, uprooted your trees, demolished your homes, and you still demand freedom? Don't you get the message? You will never have peace or freedom, because I am Israel.


http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/photos/maps/landloss.html