Obviously encouraged by the outgoing US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer’s statement that President Bush would back keeping larger West Bank colonial Jewish settlements under Israeli control in a permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians, Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon reiterated in Washington on Sunday that the major colony blocs “are going to be a part of Israel” and “contiguous with Israel,” including Jerusalem’s Ma’ale Adumim.

“In the context of a final status agreement, the United States will support the retention by Israel of areas with a high concentration of Israeli population,” Kurtzer said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

“The policy is exactly what the president (George W. Bush) said,” Kurtzer said in the prerecorded interview to Israel Radio.

Kurtzer, who completed his term Friday, cited an April 2004 letter from Bush to Ariel Sharon, setting out the US position on settlements.

“In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” Bush wrote in the letter handed to Sharon during a visit to Washington on April 14 last year.

Bush’s letter, which also pledged that the United States will not support the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” and said that a return to the prewar borders of 1949 was unlikely, was dubbed by Palestinian officials as a “New Balfor Declaration.”

When asked by The Jerusalem Post before leaving: “In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Sharon referred to President George Bush’s letter of commitments from April 2004 as nothing less than an agreement. What is the status of this letter. Is it binding on the president that will come after Bush?” Kurtzer replied:

“Congress supported the letter in a resolution, but it was no concretized in law. But it carries great weight, not only because it is a commitment of the US, but it is in writing by the president. It is part of a package where the prime minister provided a letter to the president, the president provided a letter to the prime minister, and there were other attachments.”
palestine-pmc.com

Here’s the story re: Kurtzer the NY Times did NOT publish yesterday.

It’s not every day Amnesty International asks me to go see a Nic Cage movie. So, when I got their e-mail about “Lord of War,” I promptly caught a bargain matinee at my local multiplex. This is not a movie review but, by Hollywood standards, “Lord of War” rates R for radical…and I was pleased to witness a film about the governments and freelancers supplying the weapons that kill men, women, and children every minute of every day.

According to the Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org):

*Half of the world’s governments spend more on defense than health care.

*The U.S. share of total world military expenditures per year has been roughly 36 percent, while comprising under 5 percent of the world’s population.

*The U.S. Arms Industry is the second most heavily subsidized industry after agriculture.

*2001 world military expenditures topped $839 billion, while at the same time an estimated 1.3 billion people survive on less than the equivalent of $1 (U.S.) a day.

*The International Red Cross has estimated that one out of every two casualties of war is a civilian caught in the crossfire.

*The United Nations estimates there to be over 300,000 child soldiers around the world, now serving as combatants in over 30 current conflicts.

*The Center for International Policy estimates that around 80% of U.S. arms exports to the developing world go to non-democratic regimes.

*There are more landmines planted in Cambodia than people. Cambodia is just one of 64 countries around the world littered with some 100 million anti-personnel landmines. Intended primarily to maim, landmines can lie in wait years after a conflict ends, causing 500 deaths and injuries per week.

*The U.S. government is training soldiers in upwards of 70 countries at any given time.

“Since the end of the Second World War, tens of millions of people have been killed by conventional weapons, mostly small arms such as rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers,” reports Lowell Bergman of Frontline. “Low-tech, handheld weapons and explosives do the vast majority of the killing today. There are more than 550 million small arms currently in circulation, many of them fueling bloody civil strife in countries from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone.”

And the home of the brave is the number one merchant of death. In 2004, the #2 and #3 weapons-exporting nations were France ($4.4 billion) and Russia ($4.6 billion). At #1 was the United States at $18.5 billion…and if that number alone isn’t enough to provoke action, consider where those weapons are going.

“The U.S. has a long-standing (and accelerating) policy of arming, training, and aiding some of the world’s most repressive regimes,” says Frida Berrigan, Senior Research Associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute. “The U.S. transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts in 2003, the last year for which full Pentagon data is available.”
informationclearinghouse.info

The day after Hurricane Katrina hit, exposing much of the public to the tragic conditions of poverty in America, the Census Bureau quietly released its annual report entitled, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States.” In some respects, it provided a demonstrable backdrop to the pockets of poverty common to New Orleans and other cities. It also explained why, despite President Bush’s assertion last month that, “Americans have more money in their pockets,” many people aren’t faring as well as they once did.

The report indicates that in 2004 there was no increase in average annual household incomes for black, white, or Hispanic families. In fact, this marks the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping records that household incomes failed to increase for five consecutive years. Since President Bush took office, the average annual household family income has declined by $2,572, approximately 4.8 percent.

Black families had the lowest average income last year, at $30,134. By comparison, the average income for white families was $48,977. The average pretax family income for all racial groups combined was $44,389, which is the lowest it has been since 1997. The South had the lowest average family income in 2004.

Interestingly enough, as the Economic Policy Institute notes in their analysis of the Census Bureau’s report, not all families did poorly last year. Although the portion of the total national income going to the bottom 60 percent of families did not increase last year, the portion going to the wealthiest five percent of families rose by 0.4 percent. And while the average inflation-adjusted family income of middle-class Americans declined by 0.7 percent in 2004, the wealthiest five percent of families enjoyed a 1.7 percent increase.
zmag.org

NOUMEA, New Caledonia (Reuters) – The initial outbreak of what could explode into a bird flu pandemic may affect only a few people, but the world will have just weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.

Chances of containment are limited because the potentially catastrophic infection may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003. Avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus.

It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died. There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic starts.
breitbart.com

Bird flu could cause global economic catastrophe

by Robert Fisk
n an age when Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara can identify “evil ideologies” and al-Qa’ida can call the suicide bombing of 156 Iraqi Shias “good news” for the “nation of Islam”, thank heaven for our readers, in particular John Shepherd, principal lecturer in religious studies at St Martin’s College, Lancaster.

Responding to a comment of mine – to the effect that “deep down” we do, however wrongly, suspect that religion has something to do with the London bombings – Mr Shepherd gently admonishes me. “I wonder if there may be more to it than that,” he remarks. And I fear he is right and I am wrong.

His arguments are contained in a brilliantly conceived article on the roots of violence and extremism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and the urgent need to render all religions safe for “human consumption”.

Put very simply, Mr Shepherd takes a wander through some of the nastiest bits of the Bible and the Koran – those bits we prefer not to quote or not to think about – and finds that mass murder and ethnic cleansing get a pretty good bill of health if we take it all literally.

The Jewish “entry into the promised land” was clearly accompanied by bloody conquest and would-be genocide. The Christian tradition has absorbed this inheritance, entering its own “promised land” with a ruthlessness that extends to cruel anti-Semitism. The New Testament, Mr Shepherd points out, “contains passages that would … be actionable under British laws against incitement to racial hatred” were they to be published fresh today.

The Muslim tradition – with its hatred of idolatry – contains, in the career of the Prophet, “scenes of bloodshed and murder which are shocking to modern religious sensibilities”.

Thus, for example, Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli military doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, committed his mass murder on Purim, a festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish communities from the Persian empire which was followed by large-scale killing “to avenge themselves on their enemies” (Esther 8:13).

The Palestinians, of course, were playing the role of the Persians, at other times that of the Amalekites (“… kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” – 1, Samuel 15:1, 3). The original “promised land” was largely on what is now the West Bank – hence the Jewish colonisation of Palestinian land – while the coastal plain was not (although suggestions that Israel should transplant itself further east, leaving Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon to the Palestinians of the West Bank are unlikely to commend themselves to Israel’s rulers).

The “chosen people” theme, meanwhile, moved into Christianity – the Protestants of Northern Ireland, for example, (remember the Ulster Covenant?), and apartheid South Africa and, in some respects, the United States.

The New Testament is laced with virulent anti-Semitism, accusing the Jews of killing Christ. Read Martin Luther. The Koran demanded the forced submission of conquered peoples in the name of religion (the Koran 9:29), and Mohammed’s successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, stated specifically that “we will treat as an unbeliever whoever rejects Allah and Mohammed, and we will make holy war upon him … for such there is only the sword and fire and indiscriminate slaughter.”

So there you go. And how does Mr Shepherd deal with all this? Settlement policy should be rejected not because it is theologically questionable but because the dispossession of a people is morally wrong. Anti-Semitism must be rejected not because it is incompatible with the Gospels but because it is incompatible with any basic morality based on shared human values.

If Muslim violence is to be condemned, it is not because Mohammed is misunderstood but because it violates basic human rights. “West Bank settlements, Christian anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism … are not morally wrong because theologically questionable – they are theologically questionable because morally wrong.”

And it is true that most Christians, Jews and Muslims draw on the tolerant, moderate aspects of their tradition. We prefer not to accept the fact that the religions of the children of Abraham are inherently flawed in respect of intolerance, discrimination, violence and hatred. Only – if I understand Mr Shepherd’s thesis correctly – by putting respect for human rights above all else and by making religion submit to universal human values can we ” grasp the nettle”.

Phew. I can hear the fundamentalists roaring already. And I have to say it will probably be the Islamic ones who will roar loudest. Reinterpretation of the Koran is such a quicksand, so dangerous to approach, so slippery a subject that most Muslims will not go near.

How can we suggest that a religion based on “submission” to God must itself “submit” to our happy-clappy, all-too-Western ” universal human rights”? I don’t know. Especially when we ” Christians” have largely failed to condemn some of our own atrocities – indeed, have preferred to forget them.

Take the Christians who massacred the Muslims of Srebrenica. Or take the Christians – Lebanese Phalangist allies of the Israelis – who entered the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut and slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian Muslim civilians.

Do we remember that? Do we recall that the massacres occurred between 16 and 18 September 1982? Yes, today is the 23rd anniversary of that little genocide – and I suspect The Independent will be one of the very few newspapers to remember it. I was in those camps in 1982. I climbed over the corpses. Some of the Christian Phalangists in Beirut even had illustrations of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts, just as the Christian Serbs did in Bosnia.

Are we therefore in a position to tell our Muslim neighbours to “grasp the nettle”? I rather think not. Because the condition of human rights has been so eroded by our own folly, our illegal invasion of Iraq and the anarchy that we have allowed to take root there, our flagrant refusal to prevent further Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, our constant, whining demands that prominent Muslims must disown the killers who take their religious texts too literally, that we have long ago lost our moral compass.

A hundred years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region so cracked with fault lines and artificial frontiers and heavy with injustices that we are in no position to lecture the Islamic world on human rights and values. Forget the Amalekites and the Persians and Martin Luther and the Caliph Abu Bakr. Just look at ourselves in the mirror and we will see the most frightening text of all.
informationclearinghouse.info

NEW YORK (AP) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that he would attempt to improve his relations with Washington, which have been rocky in recent months.

”Sometimes I make mistakes, I tend to respond to any official from the government of Mr. Bush who verbally attacks Venezuela,” Chavez said during a speech at a Manhattan church, his last public event in New York before heading to Cuba to meet with his close ally Fidel Castro.

Chavez said the Rev. Jesse Jackson and U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., who sat with him at the church, had advised him ”not to be provoked” by representatives of the U.S. government.
nytimes.com

Hurricane Hugo at the UN
“Practically no one in the United States knows that we’ve donated millions of dollars to the governorship of Louisiana, to the New Orleans Red Cross. We’re now giving care to more than 5,000 victims, and now we’re going to supply gasoline, freely in some cases, and with discounts in other cases, to the poorest of communities, starting with New Orleans and its surroundings… We’ve been helping. And we’ve been even rescuing people.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; “Nightline” with Ted Koppel, 9-16-05

Hugo Chavez’s performance at the UN was greeted with the bucket-loads of bile that one expects from America’s rightward-titling media. Washington Post hatchet-man Colum Lynch provided a typical summary of the speech by dismissing it as “a rant” from the Venezuelan “bad-boy”. But, Lynch isn’t alone in his hostility; the outpouring of venom came from all corners; appearing in many newspapers across the nation, invoking the hackneyed expressions of contempt for any foreign leader who rebuffs Washington or who follows redistributive economic policies.

…Unlike Bush, Chavez’s record is backed up by a solid performance in nearly every area of social development. Its no wonder the elitist American media, driven by their class-based ideology, has tried so desperately to discredit him.

Chavez oratory to the General Assembly will undoubtedly elevate him in the eyes of many as a serious futurist who offers genuine solutions for a war-ravaged planet. His personal fortitude and optimism are matched by his selfless conduct as President; working persistently on behalf of his people and strengthening global relations. His iconic image around the world is well deserved.

“We will fight for Venezuela, for Latin American integration and the world. We reaffirm our infinite faith in humankind. We are thirsty for peace and justice in order to survive as species… Now is the time to not allow our hands to be idle or our souls to rest until we save humanity.”

His speech was received with thunderous applause.

The United States and its allies said yesterday that they would push for a resolution critical of Iran from the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency, although the body might not refer the country to the Security Council for sanctions.

The action came a day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran stood before the General Assembly, vowing to press ahead with a nuclear program and berating the United States and Europe for trying to interfere. Western diplomatic officials said the address had essentially played into their hands, making the monitoring body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, more likely to approve a strong resolution at its meeting, which begins today.
nytimes.com

TEL AVIV, Sept. 18 – Daniel C. Kurtzer has spent the last four years trying to represent the United States to Israel, two countries that think they understand each other.

“I think this is the most complicated, complex and politically challenging relationship of any we have in the world,” Mr. Kurtzer said. Not only do the leaders have inevitably close relations and connections that often bypass the ambassadors in Tel Aviv and Washington, “but the other country is a key factor in the domestic politics of the other.”

“The sense of intimacy at the top tends to make it challenging for both the ambassador in Washington and here to stay in the game and manage the policy flow,” Mr. Kurtzer said in an interview last week. It can lead to misunderstandings, like the Israeli assumption that its sale of antimissile weapons to China would not really matter to the United States, which was outraged. The Middle East as an issue “has been at the nexus of the most serious foreign-policy issues of the last 25 years,” he said, so as a job, “it’s hard to do.”

By most accounts Mr. Kurtzer, an observant Orthodox Jew with close family ties to Israel, did his job well, first as ambassador to Egypt beginning in 1997 and then to Israel, beginning in July 2001, as the hopes for peace he helped nurture as part of an agreement reached in Oslo more than a decade ago crashed and burned in suicide bombings and a cycle of retaliation.

“It took him awhile to realize that Oslo was over,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer for The New Republic and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a conservative research organization in Jerusalem. “But he proved to be a fast learner. I think he began to see the Oslo process the way most of us here had come to see it, as a disaster for Israel.”
Full: nytimes.com

That attack, and a string of others that have followed, all aimed at Shiites, have brought new vulnerability and dysfunction to the streets of Baghdad, the capital. For days, three of the four main roads leading in and out of Kadhimiya have been closed. Neighborhoods have been unusually quiet, as Shiites stay home, afraid to venture out. The violence has also reinforced a new reality of the war here: That Shiites are now paying the highest price in blood of any group in Iraq.

“Americans are not attacked anymore; it’s the Shiites who suffer from these bombings,” said a 40-year-old owner of a cigarette shop in front of the bombing site, who gave only his nickname, Abu Ali. “It is increasing now. Sometimes several in one day.”

American service members are clearly still a major target of insurgent attacks, with deaths reported every week, and the overall toll in the war nearing 2,000. But in recent months, insurgents have pointedly shifted their focus toward killing Shiite civilians, with the number of attacks on mosques, markets and populated areas rising sharply since the spring. The threat of further massacres was sharpened last week when the architect of much of the killing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared a “full-scale war on Shiites all over Iraq, wherever and whenever they are found.”
nytimes.com

Has ‘al Zarqawi’s’ bio changed again? It said he fought beside bin Laden in Afrghanistan, and named his group ‘al Quaeda in Iraq’. I have to look in the archive, but isn’t ‘he’ a Shi’ite? The quotes reflect the fact that I am not at all convinced of ‘his’ existence.

If some of those who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been described as stubborn holdouts who ignored an order to evacuate, then these citizens of New Orleans defy that portrait: The 16 whose bodies were wrapped in white sheets in the chapel of Memorial Medical Center. The 34 whose corpses were abandoned and floating in St. Rita’s Nursing Home. The 15 whose bodies were stored in an operating room turned makeshift morgue at Methodist Hospital.

“The statement that you can judge a society by the way it treats elders and the vulnerable is a good way to look at our society.” Alice Hedt, National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform executive director
The count does not stop there. Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, were patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes. By the scores, people without choice of whether to leave or stay perished in New Orleans, trapped in health care facilities and in many cases abandoned by their would-be government rescuers.

Heroic efforts by doctors and nurses across the city prevented the toll from being vastly higher. Yet the breadth of the collapse of one of society’s most basic covenants – to care for the helpless – suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans.
nytimes.com