Academics voted today to overturn their controversial boycott of Israeli universities, sources said.

Delegates were said to have voted overwhelmingly in favour of abandoning the boycott at a special meeting of the Association of University Teachers in London.

The AUT said it would now base its policy on providing “practical solidarity to Palestinian and Israeli trade unionists and academics” by agreeing a motion committing the union to having a full review of international policy, working alongside the lecturers’ union Natfhe and the Trades Union Congress.
guardian.co.uk

Cowards.

WASHINGTON, May 25 – Newly released documents show that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained repeatedly to F.B.I. agents about disrespectful handling of the Koran by military personnel and, in one case in 2002, said they had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

The prisoners’ accounts are described by the agents in detailed summaries of interrogations at Guantanamo in 2002 and 2003. The documents were among more than 300 pages turned over by the F.B.I. to the American Civil Liberties Union in recent days and publicly disclosed Wednesday.
Full: nytimes.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq announced plans Thursday to deploy 40,000 police and soldiers in the capital and ring the city with hundreds of checkpoints “like a bracelet” in the largest show of Iraqi force since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

In a reminder of the difficulty Iraqi security forces face in stopping insurgent attacks, violence claimed at least 15 lives Thursday in Baghdad including a car bomb that exploded near a police patrol, killing five people and wounding 17.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told a small group of Western reporters that next week’s planned crackdown, dubbed Operation Lightning, was designed “to restore the initiative to the government.” Insurgents have killed more than 620 people since his government was announced on April 28.

“We will establish, with God’s help, an impenetrable blockade surrounding Baghdad like a bracelet surrounds a wrist,” Defense Minister Saadoun al-Duleimi said.

Iraqi authorities did not say how long the crackdown would last, and it was uncertain if the Iraq security services are capable of mounting a sustained operation. Except for a few elite units, most police officers are believed to have joined up for the higher pay the job provides — at $300 per month their salaries are triple the average wage.
Full: news.yahoo.com

I heard a policeman from Basra say that they all knew that 50% of the police are affiliated with ‘insurgent’ groups.

by John Chuckman
May 24, 2005—Like a refreshing breeze blowing briefly over those damned to endure the hell created by America’s government came the words of British M.P. George Galloway to an American Senate Committee. The man was simply magnificent. Tough, brave, and articulate—hurling unanswerable truth at blubbering political lowlifes in silk suits.

Washington is the most dishonest place on earth, and with that fact goes another, that the American people are among the earth’s worst governed. These creepy American Gauleiters had wronged Galloway with faked accusations of his profiting from oil trading with Saddam Hussein. My God, it’s just one filthy lie after another. They tried smearing Kofi Anan with the same kind of stuff.

Why is it so rarely Americans who take on their own lying, murderous political establishment? It has always been the same. How few Americans stood up to that bellowing angry drunk, political wife-beater, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or that ugly maggot sucking at the nation’s liberties, J. Edgar Hoover.

George Galloway’s real crime is to have been a sharp thorn in Tony Blair’s side, a powerful critic of the criminal Iraq War. Blair dreamt he would rise to Churchillian heights by attending training classes in Crawford, Texas, on how to rig an illegal war. Today he looks more like the sad, depleted Lloyd George expressing his admiration for that rising new star in Europe, Hitler.
Full: onlinejournal.com

by Lenni Brenner
On May 4th, an article, “Board’s Amazon Appeal,” appeared on Jewish News, a Zionist website. It reported that the Board Of Deputies Of British Jews, pro-Zionist religious Jewry’s central organization, had complained to Amazon re a book I edited, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.

I wrote the Board. It responded. I answered their critique & challenged them to publicly debate the issue. Below is the Jewish News article and the correspondence between me & the Board.

The Holocaust is being heavily memorialized this year, the 60th anniversary of the end of WW ll. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan attended the opening of Israel’s new museum at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Institute. NYC’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, running for reelection, was Bush’s official representative. Documentaries have appeared on TV re differing aspects of Nazism & the atrocity.

Altho historians have examined Nazism in detail in all its complexity, the present general public, world-wide, is interested in little more than the Holocaust, the Jews as victims. Few, Jew or gentile, know anything about the range of Jewish politics in the Hitler era.

What happened to the Jews is constantly utilized in Zionist propaganda as justification for the creation of the Israeli state, the silver lining around the dark cloud of desolation. That’s the tip off that there is something missing: What did the Zionists do for the Jews? There is no 51 Documents: Zionist Resistance to the Nazis.

The Board’s attempt to discredit my book with Amazon, and their response to me, permitted me to briefly document some of my charges. But this is no substitute for delving deeper into the controversy. For this, I recommend looking at my 1st book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, in conjunction with 51 Documents, which contains complete texts of much of the material cited in the earlier work. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is out of print, but is on the internet at www.marxists.de

I must thank the Board. Its crude attempt to discredit the book with Amazon backfired. They have put some of their later-day rationalizations for such collaboration out there for the world to see. Now they will have to debate me, or demonstrate, once & for all & forever, that they don’t dare defend Zionism’s shameful politics during Jewry’s desperate hour.
Full: counterpunch.org

It was a culinary rebuke that echoed around the world, heightening the sense of tension between Washington and Paris in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But now the US politician who led the campaign to change the name of french fries to “freedom fries” has turned against the war.
Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was also the brains behind french toast becoming freedom toast in Capitol Hill restaurants, told a local newspaper the US went to war “with no justification”.

Mr Jones, who in March 2003 circulated a letter demanding that the three cafeterias in the House of Representatives’ office buildings ban the word french from menus, said it was meant as a “light-hearted gesture”.

But the name change, still in force, made headlines around the world, both for what it said about US-French relations and its pettiness.

Now Mr Jones appears to agree. Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign – an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God’s hand and a constituent’s request – he replied: “I wish it had never happened.”

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the “faces of the fallen”.

“If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong,” he told the newspaper. “Congress must be told the truth.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

An American scientists’ group has urged Britain’s biggest university teachers’ union to repeal its boycott of two Israeli universities.

The boycott is “counter to the positive role of free scientific inquiry in improving the lives of all citizens of the world and in promoting cooperation among nations,” said the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science yesterday.

The Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted last month to boycott Haifa and Bar Ilan universities for actions which it said undermined Palestinian rights and academic freedom. It also referred a motion to its executive committee to boycott the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It said last week it would reconsider the boycott.

Alan Leshner, president of the US body, said: “Multinational research collaboration should never be compromised to advance a political agenda.” The 120,000-member AAAS is the world’s biggest general scientific society. Last week, the American Federation of Teachers, the largest university faculty union in the US, also called for a repeal of the boycott.
Full: guardian.co.uk

“Advance a political agenda”…No. It’s called taking an ethical stand, something with which most academics are apparently unfamiliar.

Dvir Hemo was 11 years old when he stepped in front of a car one Saturday evening on his way to get pizza. By sunset the next day, his body had been interred in the small, neat cemetery in the Jewish settlement block of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, where the Star of David flies over 46 graves.
For the past two and a half years, Dvir’s mother, Iris, has visited his grave – at first every day, then at least once a week. But she faces the agony of leaving her dead son behind when, this summer, she and her family are forced to leave their homes on Palestinian land.

Dvir’s whole short life was tied to Gush Katif, said Mrs Hemo; every memory she has of him is there. “I don’t want to think about what will happen to my son’s grave,” she said. “I pray every day that evacuation won’t happen.”

Dvir’s tombstone lies behind a tall fence and padlocked gates a few hundred metres from the teeming and dilapidated Palestinian refugee camp of Khan Yunis, where 40,000 people live in overcrowded cinder block homes under Israeli army watchtowers. It is very different from the tidy bungalows, green lawns and wide avenues of Gush Katif, home to 5,500 Jewish settlers.

In a few months, that land – with other colonies in Gaza and the northern West Bank – will be returned to the Palestinians as part of Ariel Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan.
Full: guardian.co.uk

This article is shameful. How many Palestinian mothers have lost their children in Gaza, and far more hideously than being hit by a car?

It could take at least five years before Iraqi forces are strong enough to impose law and order on the country, the International Institute of Strategic Studies warned yesterday.
The thinktank’s report said that Iraq had become a valuable recruiting ground for al-Qaida, and Iraqi forces were nowhere near close to matching the insurgency.

John Chipman, IISS director, said the Iraqi security forces faced a “huge task” and the continuing ability of the insurgents to inflict mass casualties “must cast doubt on US plans to redeploy American troops and eventually reduce their numbers”.

Insurgents have killed 600 Iraqis since the new government was formed. The IISS report said: “Best estimates suggest that it will take up to five years to create anything close to an effective indigenous force able to impose and guarantee order across the country.”
Full: guardian.co.uk

Well indeed, order can be imposed, temporarily, but neither peace nor democracy can. But neither peace, nor democracy, nor order, are part of the plan.

A global taskforce should be urgently formed to tackle a potential influenza pandemic that could affect 20% of the world’s population, trigger economic disaster and kill millions, experts warned today.

A report in scientific journal Nature gives a fearful assessment of the huge impact a pandemic could have on the world, with an estimate that more than seven million people could die in the first few months.

A pandemic would change the world “overnight” and could be worse than previous outbreaks because of the greater interlinked nature of modern life, experts told Nature.

Fears of a pandemic have increased because of the outbreak of the current H5N1 bird flu strain in south-east Asia, which has caused 51 confirmed human deaths.

At present, there is no evidence that the H5N1 strain can be transmitted from one person to another, but it may only be a matter of time before the virus mutates into a form that can easily pass between people. If that were to happen it would spread rapidly around the world with devastating consequences. The fatality rate of humans infected by the virus is as high as 60%.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Nobel scientist warns on bird flu
Avian flu – caught directly from birds, and which kills in seven cases out of 10 – could suddenly sweep through the human population, killing 70 million people according to World Health Organisation estimates, a Nobel laureate warned yesterday.

Peter Doherty, of the University of Melbourne, who shared the 1996 Nobel prize for medicine, was speaking at an assembly of laureates in Lyon, France, 50 years to the day after the first announcement of an effective vaccine against the crippling disease poliomyelitis. World health teams hope to eliminate polio altogether by the end of 2005. But, Prof Doherty warned the Biovision conference, there were more immediate hazards.
Full: guardian.co.uk