- A year and a half ago, United States Secretary of State
Colin Powell was indignant at the United Nations because the then government
of Iraq would not respect the last two UN resolutions passed against it.
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- "A story of disdain towards the international community
represented by the UN," he said of an institution the Bush administration
was going to ignore shortly afterwards in an unprecedented move of arrogance
vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
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- But everybody also remembers that he was not taken seriously
because the Israeli record of disrespect for resolutions passed against
the country was even worse.
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- Israel indeed never cared about resolutions, knowing
that they would never be enforced against it.
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- And no one can thus be surprised by Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's reaction to the recent non-binding judgement of the International
Court of Justice, ICJ, on the Israeli wall: "The construction by Israel,
the occupying power, of the barrier on occupied Palestinian territory is
illegal.
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- "It is a violation of the humanitarian international
law because it restricts the freedom of movement of the Palestinians, preventing
them from finding a job, medical services or a school for their children.
Israel is ordered to stop the construction of the wall in occupied Palestinian
territories and may even be asked to pay compensation for the damages caused."
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- Yet, Israel will not abide, simply because this ruling
does not suit it. "This decision is of no importance," said Sharon,
"because it does not mention the existence of terrorism". To
average people or states, the ruling of a judge normally applies in its
entirety.
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- Hide And Live
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- But the "Chosen People" only accept what suits
them. As a "unique" entity, how could Israel behave just like
any other country in the world?
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- Actually, nobody would have denied Sharon the right to
build new ghettos, protected by six-metre high concrete barriers, behind
which his fellow Israelis could hide and live among themselves without
any interference from outside - provided that this is built on their own
land and not on Palestinian land that is temporarily occupied.
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- This is what the ICJ said, because this is international
law. But Sharon knows that the Bush administration and their Zionist, neo-conservative
friends will never enforce any resolution against Israel. Why, then, should
he care about it?
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- Sharon was not even ready to give a hand to a friend
"since the first hour" in the Iraqi plot, British Prime Minister
Tony Blair. As everybody knows, there is one thing that can make Blair
the happiest man on earth, the discovery of WMDs in Iraq. But these could
not be found, because they did not exist.
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- In fact, Blair will likely stay in the people's mind
as "Mr. 45 minutes". It would have been so easy for Sharon to
tell Blair where to find WMDs in the region, something known for years
- in Israel.
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- After 17,000 Iraqi military personnel and civilians were
killed, about 40,000 others wounded and $150 billion spent for the wrong
reasons, one could have expected some help from Tel Aviv. But the Sharon
government will not confirm or deny the fact that it has nuclear weapons.
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- The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
IAEA, Mohammad El Baradei, was in Israel two weeks ago. He hoped to meet
with Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli engineer who spent 18 years in jail
because he was brave enough to mention the Israeli nuclear site at Dimona
as the likely place to find between 200 to 400 nuclear warheads.
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- The nuclear weapons here can be delivered using many
of the American provided delivery systems (does anyone remember the British
uproar when it was revealed that some of the rockets owned by the former
Iraqi regime could go six miles longer than previously thought?).
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- Of course, Vanunu was not allowed to meet El Baradei.
The Israeli government refused to recognise it had nuclear arms and it
also refused to allow its sites to be visited because "Israel is forced
to maintain ... all the strength necessary for its defence". Which
is obviously not the case with the rest of the world, including Iran. Actually,
international law clearly doesn't apply to Israel.
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- It is widely known that the group of American Zionists
that managed to penetrate the US government after the last presidential
election was waiting for an opportunity to impose its own agenda on the
Middle East. September 11, 2001, could not have come at a better time for
them.
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- Whatever the reasons for the attacks, and for sure none
of them were good, it is difficult not to see a link between them and America's
biased policies in Palestine. That may not have been in Osama bin Laden's
mind, but surely was in the minds of many in the Arab world when the event
occurred.
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- Israel and its friends projected the terrorist threat
against the US as a Muslim and, subsequently, as an Arab threat against
"the free world". That is, a threat against Israel itself.
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- "The fourth World War could well be the war against
militant Islam," says Norman Podhoretz, the neo-conservative editor
of Commentary magazine in the US, whereas another neo-conservative, historian
Bernard Lewis, adds about Muslims: "They have been hating us for centuries."
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- Vision Of A World
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- "Us" refers to the whole world minus the Arabs.
Once the Washington hawks start to endorse a vision of a world where "evil"
should be eradicated, what will happen if "evil" means the Arab
world? A recent article about 9/11 in the Washington Post by US yet another
neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer is symptomatic of this new line of
thought.
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- Islamic militants is the new global threat the US will
have to fight, he said, and as this is a product of the Islamic world,
the "Arab world" for short, this is where the fight should be
led.
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- We have learnt to live with the delirious vision of these
fanatic zealots for many years now. But when this becomes the vision of
the world's strongest military, one has good reasons to start worrying.
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- http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/Opinion2.asp?ArticleID=126913
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