NOVANEWS
Israel: Next Gaza war will be extensive
Zio=Nazi army chief Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi has proclaimed that the next ‘big’ Nazi onslaught on the Gaza Strip will determine the victor, reports say.
“The next round (of fighting) will be extensive and it should end in such a way where there is no doubt as to which side triumphed,” Ynetnews quoted Nazi Ashkenazi as telling Zio=Nazi Gestapo troops based near the coastal sliver on Wednesday.
He also underpinned the Zio=Nazi military’s preparedness for wider action against the impoverished strip.
Nazi Ashkenazi made the remarks on the heels of Zio=Nazi airstrikes on several places across Gaza.
Nazi warplanes carried out airstrikes near the city of Khan Younis in the south, bombarding a chicken farm on Wednesday.
The warplanes also attacked the city of Rafah, also in the south, targeting the tunnels beneath Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Zionist media confirmed the air raids on the blockaded coastal strip but reported no casualties.
The last time Nazi Gestapo’s launched an all-out war on Gaza was at the turn of 2009. The offensive claimed the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians — most of them women and children.
The coastal enclave has been under the Nazi siege since June 2007 after Hamas took control of the region following a democratic election.
The illegal Nazi-imposed blockade has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the enclave.
Nazi to Destroy Electric Infrastructure
A Palestinian home destroyed by Israeli soldiersIsrael has ordered destruction of electricity infrastructure in two Palestinian villages in the West Bank, but the villagers say that they will not allow such a move to be carried out.
The head of the village council of Rifaya and al-Deirat, near Yatta, in southern West Bank, has been issued orders Thursday by the Israeli authorities for the demolition of a transformer and power lines that supply electricity to 800 people in the two remote villages, Maan reported.
The local Popular Committee chairman, Azmi Ash-Sheiyukhi, said that the residents of al-Deirat had themselves paid for the transformer.
He also said residents have planned to mount a legal challenge to the demolition orders, which he called “illegitimate and illegal.”
Israeli harassments of residents in the southern West Bank villages near Yatta date back to as early as 1981. Large areas of Palestinian land have since been confiscated. Currently five illegal Jewish settlements exist in that area.
Israeli occupiers have repeatedly demolished Palestinians’ homes and have expropriated their livestock and fodder. The livestock has even been shot by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
Palestinians have several times filed cases in Israeli courts, which rarely decide in favor of property owners whose lands are confiscated by Israeli authorities for building settlements. Many such cases remain pending in the courts without any outcome.
US steps up pressure on Latino Muslims
US officials have been increasingly concerned about more Latinos converting to Islam, with increased monitoring and high profile cases appearing in the media.
The recent case of Antonio Martinez — a young Latino man charged with plotting to blow up a military recruitment center near Baltimore, Maryland — has garnered much media interest.
Reports say that Martinez, who is a Muslim convert, was entrapped by FBI undercover agents that led the young Latino to collaborate in an alleged attempt to bomb the military compound.
“It’s [not only] the nature of these individuals but also their case studies, the substantive dimensions of their work, and who they are in contact with, and what they represent that I think is why Latino converts have garnered some attention,” NPR quoted former Deputy National Security Adviser to the Bush administration Juan Zarate as saying in regard to Martinez.
Thousands of Latinos — a community predominately Catholic — have converted to Islam nationwide. The Latino community stands as the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, while Islam is the fast-growing religion.
The Muslim community has criticized the FBI for racial profiling. FBI tactics include spying on worshippers at mosques and entrapment by undercover agents.
One case has involved an undercover FBI informant and an ex-convict in Irvine, California, named Craig Monteilh. Members of a mosque that he infiltrated obtained a restraining order against him after he kept talking about carrying out violent activities.
Monteilh is now suing the FBI and has gone public with details of how he was trained to spy and entrap people.
“They got a guy, a bona fide criminal, and obviously trained him and sent him to infiltrate mosques,” said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.
“And when things went sour, they ditched him and he got mad,” Syed added.
Ex-EU leaders urge Zio=Nazi sanctions
A group of former European leaders have called for tough sanctions against Israel in response to Tel Aviv’s failure to stop settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land.
Criticizing the European Union’s existing policy toward Israel, in a letter sent to European governments and EU institutions on Monday, former heads of states, ministers and heads of European organizations said Israel must be made to feel “the consequences” and face “a price tag” for breaking international law by expanding its Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
They have also urged European countries to recognize a free and independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital.
“EU will not recognize any changes to the June 1967 boundaries, and clarify that a Palestinian state should be in sovereign control over territory equivalent to 100 percent of the territory occupied in 1967, including its capital in East Jerusalem (al-Quds),” the letter asked EU foreign ministers to declare to Israel.
The ex-leaders, including the former EU foreign affairs chief, Javier Solana and former German President Richard von Weizsacker, have asked EU foreign ministers to give Israel an ultimatum that if it does not end occupation and continues violating international law by April 2011, the EU will seek an end to the US-brokered negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in favor of a United Nation solution.
“Time is fast running out, Israel’s continuation of settlement activity… poses an existential threat to the prospects of establishing a sovereign, contiguous and viable Palestinian state,” the letter warned.
The ex-leaders have also urged the European Union to link its informal freeze on an upgrade in EU-Israel diplomatic relations to a settlement freeze, block imports of products made in the illegal settlements but labeled as made in Israel, and force Tel Aviv to pay for the majority of the aid required by the Palestinians, the EUobserver website reported on Friday.
They have also asked the bloc to send a high-level delegation to East al-Quds to back Palestinian claims and reclassify EU support for Palestine as “nation building” instead of “institution building.”
The signatories also include former Italian prime ministers Romano Prodi and Giuliano Amato, ex-German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, ex- Spanish PM Felipe Gonzalez and Norway’s Thorvald Stoltenberg and 10 former ministers and two former EU commissioners.
Israel occupied the West Bank, including East al-Quds, during the Six Day War in 1967 and has settled around 500,000 Jews in the occupied area. Constructing settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal under international law.
Palestinians believe that expansion of Jewish settlements on their occupied lands will make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.
‘NATO blackmailing Russia with drugs’
NATO is using Afghanistan’s opium as a threat to the Russia to force Moscow into cooperating with the alliance in the Afghan war, a US analyst says.
“There is a certain very real blackmail being imposed on Russia that the country is targeted for a kind of an opium war,” Jeff Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review said on Wednesday.
“NATO wants to send this message to Moscow that “cooperation with NATO on resupply and logistical support for Afghanistan operation might result in a curtailment of some of those drug flows which are for Russia,” Steinberg said in his interview with Press TV.
“Since the US invasion of Afghanistan back in 2001, there has been an eruption of opium and heroin flows from Afghanistan, through Central Asia, into Russia,” he went on to add.
Steinberg referred to the Russian anti-drug program study which shows that every year 100,000 Russians are dying from overdosing on heroin and opium coming out of Afghanistan.
He, however, argued that since the economic and financial crisis has prompted NATO members to reduce their military capabilities, “so the threat that NATO represented on the border of Russia, may be seen as a diminishing threat.”
“NATO is becoming more and more of a paper tiger, especially, as their mission in Afghanistan goes from bad to worse,” Steinberg added.
Jaffa’s Racist Jews Complain about Christian Church bells, cheracterizing it as noise pollution
Hundreds of Jaffa Muslims, Christians to protest against complaints from Jewish neighbors over noisy churches and mosques. ‘It’s an integral part of city, these complaints reek of racism,’ protesters say
Jaffa Arabs against Jewish neighbors: Hundreds will protest on Friday in front of the exclusive Jaffa Andromeda Hills residential project to convey their message: ‘Jews endanger religious activity in Jaffa, we will not be silenced’.
Groundbreaking exhibition of paintings by 120 Israeli, Palestinian children celebrates completion of three-year program that integrated creative, educational interactive methods in weekly joint art workshops
The protest, scheduled for last week and postponed due to the Carmel fires, is against Jewish residents who have complained that the muezzin’s calls in the mosques and the bells from the church are disturbing the peace in the neighborhood.
Over the last few weeks, the heads of mosques were summoned to the ‘Green Police’ offices of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. There it was claimed that the muezzin’s calls to prayer, which can be heard from the Siksik mosque and the Jebalya mosque in the Ajami neighborhood, disturb the other residents in the area and make too much noise.
St. George Church on Louis Pasteur street also came under scrutiny. Police officers are sent there regularly during prayer time to request that the priest and that the scouts choir lower their voices, because of complaints from Jewish residents in the area.
The issue came to a head last week when Yoav Shnitzer, a lawyer representing the residents of Andromeda Hills which is adjacent to the church, approached the church’s management. He threatened that if the noise continued, lawsuits would be brought against those responsible for the devaluation of the property.
‘Church here since 1870’
The steps taken by the Andromeda Hills residents have led the Muslim and Christian communities in Jaffa to join together and demonstrate in a vocal protest march around the exclusive project.
“The last time the police came I told them: ‘Are you crazy? Do you think I would go to the police over a cantor’s prayers?'” Chairman of the Jaffa Orthodox Church Association Gabriel Cadis noted angrily. “This isn’t Ramat Aviv or Ramat Ha’sharon.”
Cadis told Ynet that the church had been there since 1870, long before the Andromeda Hills project. This is a major threat to religious activity, he said, and an attempt to prevent freedom of religion which is prescribed in the Basic Laws.
‘Integral part of city’
There are 25,000 Arabs in Jaffa today. Some 7,000 of them are Christians; 5,000 belong to the Orthodox Church. Leaders of the Muslim community, including local council member Omar Siksik, will be taking part in Friday’s protest. Siksik was interrogated by the ‘Green Police’ due to complaints made over the noise in the mosque his family has been running since 1883.
Next week, Siksik is to meet with the ‘Green Police’ in order to try and solve the conflict. “They need to understand that even if we lower the decibel level, the muezzin’s call will still be heard in nearby buildings in the early hours of the morning,” he said.
“Mosques and churches are an integral part of the Jaffa scenery, just as much as the old framers and cobblers. There are many veteran Jewish residents who live near the mosque and with whom we have had good neighborly relations for years; they aren’t bothered by the noise.
“There is no doubt that these complaints reek of racism. Anyone who comes to live in Jaffa and thinks there are no mosques or churches, is an ignoramus who should go live somewhere else”.
‘The noise in intolerable’
Mr. Shnitzer, representative of the Andromeda Hills residents, explained the other side of the story to Ynet: “The State has rules against noise disturbance, and it doesn’t matter if these disturbances are 500 years old.
“We understand the sensitivity of the issue, and for the most part, there are good people there, but after being there a few times, the noise is simply intolerable. Legally, when there is a nuisance or injustice then an attempt to sue those responsible is allowed.”
Shnitzer claims that the church has yet to answer his calls. “We cannot continue under the precincts of the community committee,” he says. “If it doesn’t end well, we will have to go to court and no one wants this to end up there. The main problem is the use of loudspeakers by the church choir. Every resident in Tel Aviv and in Israel is entitled to live in peace and quiet.
“Our goal is to end this in the best way possible, in a neighborly and friendly fashion, and we fail to understand why the noise levels can’t be lowered. Every expert we have brought in, on a number of times, has stated that the noise levels exceeded the standard.”
Report: Two Gaza teens killed playing with leftover Zio=Nazi artillery
The two 16-year-olds were playing with the artillery east of Gaza City when it exploded.
An explosion killed two Palestinian teenagers in the Gaza Strip Friday, Palestinian medical officials said.
The teenagers, both age 16, apparently were playing with an explosive device left by the Israel Defense Force in the Shajaiyeh neighborhood, east of Gaza City, when it exploded, immediately killing one and fatally wounding the other.
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A rocket that landed in a Jewish community in the region bordering Gaza. |
Photo by: Limor Edri |
The injured teen died of his wounds at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, said the sources.
Meanwhile, the same medical sources also reported that three other Palestinians were injured from IDF shooting at areas near Gaza City.
The three, one teenager and the other two in their 30s were shot in the leg apparently when they were near the Israeli-built security fence.
They were reported in stable condition.
On Thursday, the IDF launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip, hours after a mortar shell fired by militants wounded a man at an agricultural community close to the border, IDF officials said.
A military spokeswoman said the strikes were aimed at three separate targets in the Gaza Strip, two of which militants confirmed were sites they used for training. No casualties were reported.
The IDF strike was apparently in retaliation for a rocket attack from Gaza on Wednesday night. Gaza militants fired about five mortar rounds late on Wednesday and fragments from one of them wounded one man.
The man, the head of security in one of the kibbutzim in the Eshkol region, which borders the Gaza Strip, was reportedly hit in the neck by a piece of shrapnel outside his home. He was taken by helicopter to hospital in Beersheba, but his wounds were not life-threatening, the IDF spokeswoman said.
He was the first casualty from shells fired by Gaza militants into Israel since March when an agricultural laborer from Thailand was killed when he was hit by a mortar shell.
Growing International Criticism of US Moves Against WikiLeaks
As US Seeks to ‘Acquire’ Assange, Freedom of Speech Finds Supporters
by Jason Ditz, antiwar.com
The Obama Administration is hard at work attempting to “acquire” Julian Assange from either the British or Swedish government. They’re not really sure what they can charge him with, but they’ll think of something, probably.
But concerns about the prospect that Assange is about to “disappear” into some US black hole for his role in the publication of information severely embarrassing to the US government is finally starting to rise not just among human rights groups, but in official circles as well.
“It’s just astonishing what is happening,” noted the UN’s top Human Rights official Navi Pillay, adding that the US moves against them are “potentially violating WikiLeaks’s right to freedom of expression.”
Brazilian President Lula expressed “solidarity” with Assange, andRussian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned his detention as “undemocratic.” US officials have condemned Assange as a terrorist on the basis of his publications, and top US presidential hopefuls have expressed support for assassinating him.
Stuxnet Worm Still Out of Control at Iran’s Nuclear Sites, Experts Say
www.FoxNews.com
Iran’s nuclear program is still in chaos despite its leaders’ adamant claim that they have contained the computer worm that attacked their facilities, cybersecurity experts in the United States and Europe say.
The American and European experts say their security websites, which deal with the computer worm known as Stuxnet, continue to be swamped with traffic from Tehran and other places in the Islamic Republic, an indication that the worm continues to infect the computers at Iran’s two nuclear sites.
The Stuxnet worm, named after initials found in its code, is the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever created. Examination of the worm shows it was a cybermissile designed to penetrate advanced security systems. It was equipped with a warhead that targeted and took over the controls of the centrifuge systems at Iran’s uranium processing center in Natanz, and it had a second warhead that targeted the massive turbine at the nuclear reactor in Bashehr.
Stuxnet was designed to take over the control systems and evade detection, and it apparently was very successful. Last week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after months of denials, admitted that the worm had penetrated Iran’s nuclear sites, but he said it was detected and controlled.
The second part of that claim, experts say, doesn’t ring true.
Eric Byres, a computer expert who has studied the worm, said his site was hit with a surge in traffic from Iran, meaning that efforts to get the two nuclear plants to function normally have failed. The web traffic, he says, shows Iran still hasn’t come to grips with the complexity of the malware that appears to be still infecting the systems at both Bashehr and Natanz.
“The effort has been stunning,” Byres said. “Two years ago American users on my site outnumbered Iranians by 100 to 1. Today we are close to a majority of Iranian users.”
He said that while there may be some individual computer owners from Iran looking for information about the virus, it was unlikely that they were responsible for the vast majority of the inquiries because the worm targeted only the two nuclear sites and did no damage to the thousands of other computers it infiltrated.
At one of the larger American web companies offering advice on how to eliminate the worm, traffic from Iran has swamped that of its largest user: the United States.
“Our traffic from Iran has really spiked,” said a corporate officer who asked that neither he nor his company be named. “Iran now represents 14.9 percent of total traffic, surpassing the United States with a total of 12.1 percent. Given the different population sizes, that is a significant number.”
Perhaps more significantly, traffic from Tehran to the company’s site is now double that of New York City.
Ron Southworth, who runs the SCADA (the Supervisory Control and Data Access control system that the worm specifically targeted) list server, said that until two years ago he had clearly identified users from Iran, “but they all unsubscribed at about the same time.” Since the announcement of the Stuxnet malware, he said, he has seen a jump in users, but few openly from Iran. He suspects there is a cat-and-mouse game going on that involves hiding the e-mail addresses, but he said it was clear his site was being searched by a number of users who have gone to a great deal of effort to hide their country of origin.
Byres said there are a growing number of impostors signing on to Stuxnet security sites.
“I had one guy sign up who I knew and called him. He said it wasn’t his account. In another case a guy saying he was Israeli tried to sign up. He wasn’t.”
The implication, he says, is that such a massive effort is a sign of a coordinated effort.
Ralph Langner, the German expert who was among the first to study and raise alarms about Stuxnet, said he was not surprised by the development.
“The Iranians don’t have the depth of knowledge to handle the worm or understand its complexity,” he said, raising the possibility that they may never succeed in eliminating it.
“Here is their problem. They should throw out every personal computer involved with the nuclear program and start over, but they can’t do that. Moreover, they are completely dependent on outside companies for the construction and maintenance of their nuclear facilities. They should throw out their computers as well. But they can’t,“ he explained. “They will just continually re-infect themselves.”
“With the best of expertise and equipment it would take another year for the plants to function normally again because it is so hard to get the worm out. It even hides in the back-up systems. But they can’t do it,” he said.
And Iran’s anti-worm effort may have had another setback. In Tehran, men on motorcycles attacked two leading nuclear scientists on their way to work. Using magnetic bombs, the motorcyclists pulled alongside their cars and attached the devices.
One scientist was wounded and the other killed. Confirmed reports say that the murdered scientist was in charge of dealing with the Stuxnet virus at the nuclear plants.
Amid uproar, two rabbis pull their names from letter forbidding rental of homes to Arabs
Rabbis remove their signatures after ultra-Orthodox leader denounces the religious ruling.
Two municipal chief rabbis decided on Thursday to remove their signatures from a religious ruling forbidding Israeli Jews from renting homes to gentiles.
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Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv |
Photo by: Meir Haltovsky |
Dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis had signed on to the letter, which came just months after the chief rabbi of Safed initiated a call urging Jews to refrain from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews.
Rabbi Simcha HaCohen Kook and Rabbi Yaakov Edelstein said they decided to remove their names from the letter because they did not agree with its content.
However, their decision is probably related to a statement made by leading rabbi of Israel’s non-Hasidic Orthodox sector, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, who denounced earlier on Thursday the religious ruling.
“I’ve said for some time that there are rabbis who must have their pens taken away from them,” Elyashiv remarked.
“It’s interesting that these same Zionist rabbis support symbolically selling their land to gentiles during the shmita year,” he added referring to the seven-year cycle when agricultural fields in Israel must lie fallow.
The attorney general’s office stated on Thursday that it would look into possible criminal aspects of a religious ruling to forbid renting homes to gentiles signed by a number of leading rabbis.
In an official response to a petition submitted by Meretz MK Ilan Ghilon against the signatories of the rabbis’ letter, an assistant of attorney general Yehuda Weinstein said that Weinstein would order the examination of possible criminal and disciplinary aspects of the rabbis’ letter.
“The attorney general thinks that it appears that the statements attributed to the rabbis are problematic in several aspects… and are inappropriate for public officials,” the statement said.
The attorney general office’s statement was the first official response by Israel’s legal establishment to petitions calling for legal action against the signatories of the rabbis’ letter.
Earlier on Thursday, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial decried the rabbis’ letter, deeming it a “severe blow to the values of our lives as Jews and human beings in a democratic state.”
“Past experiments have taught us just how important, and at the same time how fragile, these basic values are to coexistence and honoring the other,” the memorial said in response to the ruling.
“We know that the Jewish people, that knew suffering and persecution and experience ostracism and the revocation of basic rights, has expressed its stance on matters such as these with voices different than those we have heard today with this [ruling]”.
US urged to recognise Palestine
THE chief Palestinian negotiator has said he was hoping to secure US recognition of an independent Palestinian state.
“Israel’s defeat of US efforts places the region at a real crossroads,” Saeb Erakat said of Israel’s refusal to extend a settlement freeze. “We hope that the American administration would recognise the Palestinian state within the 1967 borders as a response to Israel’s settlement diktats and other unilateral measures.
“If the United States wants to safeguard the two-state solution, it must recognise the Palestinian state within the 1967 borders,” he said in Cairo. The Plan B of getting other countries to recognise a Palestinian state is taking shape after months of intense lobbying.
Brazil and Argentina have recognised “Palestine” and are expected to be followed by Uruguay next month. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is setting his sights on Europe and plans to ask increasingly influential Turkey to serve as a go-between.
But to secure US recognition is by far the most optimistic aim yet. One frequently raised option is to seek UN recognition. Securing a majority in the UN General Assembly would be the easier task, but winning over the Security Council would be the bigger prize. That would mean overcoming a probable US veto. Mr Erakat is to meet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington today or tomorrow, while Mr Abbas is to hold separate talks this week with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Arab leaders.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak is also heading to Washington for meetings with senior defence and administration officials.
Washington acknowledged on Tuesday that it had dropped a demand that Israel renew a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Without a new freeze, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate, deadlocking direct talks, which were launched on September 2 only to run aground three weeks later when building resumed in West Bank settlements.
But Washington said it was still holding out hope a peace deal could be reached within its 12-month target set in August.
“We believe that’s still achievable,” State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said. “It’s not going to be easy, but we haven’t changed our objective.”
A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Washington’s announcement on settlements.
“We said from the outset that settlements were not the root of the conflict and that it was only a Palestinian excuse for refusing to talk,” Nir Hefetz said.
But Mr Crowley stressed that Washington “does not accept the legitimacy” of new Israeli construction in the occupied territory.
The EU also reiterated its opposition. “The EU position on settlements is clear: they are illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace,” foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, said the US failure to secure any concession from Israel vindicated its opposition to the policy pursued by Mr Abbas’s Fatah party.
“Fatah has lost its gamble of counting on Washington as the US position on the Palestinian question is always utterly dependent on Israel,” spokesman Fawzi Barhum said.
Obama’s Offer of Free Warplanes for Israel Dies With End to Peace Talks
Now, with the
