Monday 5 January 2009

Dr M blames US for Gaza war

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has blamed the US for backing Israeli military aggression against Palestinians in Gaza, saying it makes the US "much more guilty than even the Israelis".

The former Prime Minister on Monday said that no matter how clever or powerful Israel was it would not be able to carry out the offensive without US support.

"The backing by the US gives it encouragement to do all these things which I think ordinary Americans would not like to see them do," Mahathir said in an interview with Al Jazeera.

"Israelis believe it they go to war there is this big brother that is going to come with the weapons, with the money, so they don’t care what the world thinks."

He also suggested a boycott of the greenback as a way to pressure the US, saying that if the US is impoverished "it cannot undertake all these aggressive acts".

Mahathir, also defended the Palestinians' right to retaliate against the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Meanwhile Malaysia is leading the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) in a bid to seek a special session at the UN General Assembly to stop the escalating violence in Gaza.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the Malaysian permanent envoy to the UN will discuss with officials from the 57-member OIC on how best to push for such a session.

"I hope the United States and its allies will not impede efforts to convene the special general assembly," the Bernama national news agency quoted him as saying.

In a separate statement, Abdullah urged the international community not to tolerate Israel's ground offensive which he described as "an act of total war".

The US late on Saturday blocked approval of a UN Security Council statement that called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and expressed serious concern at the escalation of violence, according to council diplomats.

Israel sent troops and tanks into Gaza on Saturday after a week-long aerial bombardment which has left more than 500 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded so far.


Read Hantu Laut's entry : Gaza:Dirty American,Ruthlessly Cruel Jews And Stupid Arabs

Galadriel's A Palestinian Holocaust?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This isnt a war. It is genocide.

Hamas, the only democratically elected government in the Arab world isnt allowed to respond to the blockade which is starving its people, but Israel is allowed to kill 531 Palestinians in what claim as its right to defend itself from the terrorist organisation, Hamas.

Israel should stop claiming itself to be a victim. It is the one who has been bullying the Palestinians for decades especially with the support of the US.

mn said...

Kak Maria,

1. Mahathir ni fasal 'blame' orang lain..no.1 !

2. Bila orang lain blame dia punya blog kerana cari pendapatan tak boleh.

3. Saya kenal Mahathir sejak umur saya 5 tahun. Saya lahir di Kota Star. Dia bekas Ahli Parlimen Kota Star.

4. Otak Mahathir ni dalam poket belakang saya.

Anonymous said...

it'a a war between Hamas and Zionis but the innocent people of Palestin become the victims in that war.

i dont know how long this war gonna last.as long as Hamas and Zionis aren't willing to seek for peace and to disarm then there will be no ending to this endless war.

Anonymous said...

Have taken extracts from an article "Israel Rules" by Gary Kamiya, a writer at large for Salon.com. Kamiya's writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, ArtForum, and Sports Illustrated, among many other publications.

"...If the U.S. was truly Israel's best friend, as it claims it is, it would tell it unequivocally that its Gaza war and its larger policy of trying to pound its foes into submission is not just immoral, but counterproductive and injurious both to Israel's interests and America's. It would insist on an immediate cease-fire, which includes the lifting of the Israeli siege of Gaza, and begin pressuring both sides to accept a long-term political settlement, along the lines of the Arab League peace plan, the Clinton parameters and the Geneva Accords. It would bolster Abbas by dismantling settlements in the West Bank, removing checkpoints and improving Palestinian lives. It would insist that the best and only way to undermine the radical rejectionists and the jihadists (who are not the same thing) is through a just peace.

In the end, this isn't about ideology but results. The region is in chaos, hard-liners are gaining power and peace is further away than ever. President-elect Obama claims to be a pragmatist. This is his chance to prove it. He has the opportunity to change course, to start pursuing Mideast policies that work. He must make it clear to Israel that the blank check is expired, the amen corner disbanded.

If Obama has the wisdom and courage to reject the Israel rules, he can begin to broker a lasting Mideast peace, weaken extremists, restore America's standing in the region and ensure Israel's long-term viability. If he doesn't, the wound will simply keep festering, and the infection will keep spreading."

Anonymous said...

Dear Tok Mommy,

My prayers are with my brothers and sisters in Gaza. Israel is bullying the poor Gazians to extermination while the world suoerpower, the US, holds Hamas accountable for the carnage.


Sickening!

Anonymous said...

This is an article worth reading:

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

Anonymous said...

In the US, Gaza is a different war

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/20091585448204690.html

The images of two women on the front page of an edition of The Washington Post last week illustrates how mainstream US media has been reporting Israel's war on Gaza.

On the left was a Palestinian mother who had lost five children. On the right was a nearly equally sized picture of an Israeli woman who was distressed by the fighting, according to the caption.

As the Palestinian woman cradled the dead body of one child, another infant son, his face blackened and disfigured with bruises, cried beside her.

The Israeli woman did not appear to be wounded in any way but also wept.

Arab frustration

To understand the frustration often felt in the Arab world over US media coverage, one only needs to imagine the same front page had the situation been reversed...