The Israeli army has seized a Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament in the West Bank.

Witnesses said that about 20 army vehicles surrounded Mahmoud Mesleh’s house in the village of Bireh near the city of Ramallah on Sunday and took him away.

The Israeli army confirmed the detention. Earlier on Sunday, an Israeli military tribunal ordered Mahmoud al-Ramhi, the detained Hamas secretary of the Palestinian parliament, to be held for a further two weeks, his lawyers said.

The court in the Ofer detention camp near Ramallah ordered al-Ramhi to be held pending charges being brought against him, probably related to his membership of the Islamist Hamas.

Ramhi, the fourth-ranking official in the Palestinian legislature, was arrested on August 20.

Israel has detained dozens of Hamas officials, including ministers, since a cross-border raid from Gaza during which Palestinian armed groups killed two soldiers and seized a third on June 25.

As part of its subsequent crackdown on Hamas, Israel detained 64 Hamas officials, including eight ministers and 29 MPs, on June 29.

aljazeera.net

…The top Kurdish politicians in Iraq officially are not pushing for an independent Kurdistan. They are all too aware that a Kurdish nation would draw intense hostility from Turkey, Iran and Syria, which all have Kurdish minorities chafing to raise their own flag. Kurds in those countries and in Iraq have long dreamed of uniting to form the nation of greater Kurdistan, encompassing up to 30 million people and stretching from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean to southern Iraq.“Both Turkey and Iran are not happy with what’s going on in Iraqi Kurdistan — having a special region, having a government, having a Parliament, and so on,” said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish member of the Iraqi Parliament. “That’s why they do those special operations, those bombings. It’s a blow against the Kurdish government in Kurdistan.”

“We have to be very careful, and we are very careful,” he added.

The type of cross-border disputes occurring in Kurdistan could spread across Iraq should the country splinter. Some Shiite leaders are working to create a nine-province autonomous Shiite region in the south, one that would include the oil fields around Basra. If this were to happen in the context of a large-scale civil war, Saudi Arabia and Syria, countries with Sunni Arab majorities, could openly back Sunni militias in Iraq against the Iranian-supported Shiite fief.

Yet whether Iraq’s neighbors like it or not, this country’s regions are heading toward greater autonomy, not less.

nytimes.com

…“A car comes through and it stops in front of my position. Sparks are coming from the car from bad brakes. All the soldiers are yelling. It’s in my vicinity, so it’s my responsibility. I didn’t fire. A superior goes, ‘Why didn’t you fire? You were supposed to fire.’ I said, ‘It was a family!’ At this time it had stopped. You could see the children in the back seat. I said, ‘I did the right thing.’ He’s like, ‘No, you didn’t. It’s procedure to fire. If you don’t do it next time, you’re punished.’”Anderson shakes his head at the memory. “I’m already not agreeing with this war. I’m not going to kill innocent people. I can’t kill kids. That’s not the way I was raised.” He says he started to look around at the ruined cityscape and the injured Iraqis, and slowly began to understand the Iraqi response. “If someone did this to my street, I would pick up a weapon and fight. I can’t kill these people. They’re not terrorists. They’re 14-year-old boys, they’re old men. We’re occupying the streets. We raid houses. We grab people. We send them off to Abu Ghraib, where they’re tortured. These are innocent people. We stop cars. We hinder everyday life. If I did this in the States, I’d be thrown in prison.”

timesonline.co.uk

How a better Middle East would look

International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.

The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

armedforcesjournal.com

What apalling racist hypocrites. Check their new map! A giant Kurdistan with access to the Black Sea and NO Palestine. And that’s just for starters…

‘Inevitable  War Trumped Up in Kirkuk

… “We, the International Crisis Group, are proposing an alternative way, a way out of this looming crisis. This would involve, most importantly, cancellation of the referendum, for now. No deadline for a referendum,” he said. “Instead, a United Nations envoy should be appointed in some capacity to mediate the conflict between the various communities and with the government and with the Kurdistan regional government to find an alternative solution. The main component of that would have to be that Kirkuk and other disputed territories would gain an interim status for maybe 10 years.”

Interim what? Interim country?

The Briton alleged to be the ‘mastermind’ behind the airline terror plot could be innocent of any significant involvement, sources close to the investigation claim.

Rashid Rauf, whose detention in Pakistan was the trigger for the arrest of 23 suspects in Britain, has been accused of taking orders from Al Qaeda’s ‘No3’ in Afghanistan and sending money back to the UK to allow the alleged bombers to buy plane tickets.

But after two weeks of interrogation, an inch-by-inch search of his house and analysis of his home computer, officials are now saying that his extradition is ‘a way down the track’ if it happens at all.

It comes amid wider suspicions that the plot may not have been as serious, or as far advanced, as the authorities initially claimed.

dailymail.co.uk
Gosh the Brits love those illusory ’Pakistani masterminds’, don’t they? I remember a few around 7/7.

…Cody and I set off to southern Lebanon over smashed bridges, round vast bomb craters, beating the earth down to allow Hassan’s “Death Car” to drive over them, trying to avoid the thousands of unexploded shells lying in the fields. So many bombs on the Litani that the river has partly changed its course and we walk into the water. We drive to Srifa, a village which clearly was – heaven preserve us from these clichés – a Hizbollah “stronghold”, but whose ruins now cover dozens of civilian dead. I am photographing the wreckage – using real film because I still feel that digital cameras lose definition – and I find that I see through the lens more pain than I see with my own eyes. I think this is because the sheer extent of the bomb damage is focused in a frame. Later, I look at my developed pictures in Beirut and am appalled by the level of destruction. Some of my pictures look like the photographs of French villages after German bombardment during my dad’s First World War. They will find 36 bodies under the Srifa rubble upon which I have walked.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14624.htm“>independent.co.uk

 More Iraqi civilians appear to have been killed in July than in any other month of the war, according to national and morgue statistics, suggesting that the much-vaunted Baghdad security plan started in June by the new government had failed.An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed per day in July, according to figures from Iraq’s Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue. At least 3,438 civilians died violently that month, a 9 percent increase over the total in June and nearly twice as many as in January.

iht.com

…I learned that there is a vast difference between Jews, or people of Israel, and the warmongering Zionists who control the state of Israel, just as there is between most American citizens and the cowardly neo-fascist chickenhawks who control the United States. The people of both regimes cry out against the barbaric genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated in their name — they shriek, they march in protest, but the world media pushed the “mute” button long ago, and no sound emerges from the weeping masses. As these two “democracies” force their way across the Middle East, it’s as if Charles Manson is stalking the innocent with a mad dog on a leash. Neither can be reasoned with, and no living creature in their path is safe. But it is easy to tell where they’ve been, because the landscape is littered with rotting corpses of innocent men, women and children, with mass graves and displaced millions fleeing for their lives.                                                                           infoclearinghouse.info

…With our War Party discredited by the failed policies it cheered on in Lebanon and Iraq, there will come a clamor that Bush must “go to the source” of all our difficultly – Iran. Only thus can the War Party redeem itself for having pushed us and Israel into two unnecessary and ruinous wars. And the drumbeat for war on Iran has already begun.

“(T)he dangers continue to mount abroad,” wails the Weekly Standard in its lead editorial. “How Bush deals with Ahmadinejad’s terror-supporting and nuclear-weapons pursuing Iran will be the test” of his administration. Yes, the supreme test.

Bush is on notice from the neocons and War Party that have all but destroyed his presidency: Either you take down Iran, Mr. Bush, or you are a failed president.

If the president is still listening to these people, Lord help the republic.

wnd.com

In a joint appearance with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush stated that the administration is now operating a war on terror on three fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. The president is hopeful that a UN Security Council resolution, calling for international troops to help the Lebanese central government gain control of Hezbollah-dominated areas, will take this over on this new “front”.

“We must help people in both Lebanon and Israel return to their homes and begin rebuilding their lives,” Bush told reporters, “without fear of renewed violence and terror.”

Bush placed the blame for the violence first on Hezbollah. “Hezbollah attacked Israel, Hezbollah started the crisis,” he said, “and Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis.”

However, Bush also asserted his belief that Hezbollah has been armed by Iran, with weapons passing through Syria. “I know they claim they didn’t have anything to do with it,” the President told reporters, “but sophisticated weaponry ended up in the hands of Hezbollah fighters, and many assume and many believe that that weaponry came from Iran through Syria.”

The United States and ally nations plan to call for UN troops to seal off Syrian borders and ports soon after the Hezbollah resolution is considered.

rawstory.com