Republican
SINN FÉIN
Poblachtach
Cumann Mac Curtáin / Mac Suibhne, Corcaigh
Irish Republican Information Service (No 200) - Date: 24ú Meitheamh / June 2009.
Irish Republican Information Service (no. 200)
Teach Dáithí Ó Conaill, 223 Parnell Street, Dublin 1, Ireland
Phone: +353-1-872 9747; FAX: +353-1-872 9757; e-mail: saoirse@iol.ie
Date: 24ú Meitheamh / June 2009
Teach Dáithí Ó Conaill, 223 Parnell Street, Dublin 1, Ireland
Phone: +353-1-872 9747; FAX: +353-1-872 9757; e-mail: saoirse@iol.ie
Date: 24ú Meitheamh / June 2009
Internet resources maintained by SAOIRSE-Irish Freedom
In this issue:
1. RSF say Union Jack will be taken down.
2. Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta protest at Provo meeting in New York.
3. Suzanne Breen: Sources ruling sets important precedent.
4. Soldier forced to confront CIRA suspects.
5. Local taxi depots threatened by loyalists.
6. Belfast Romanians in hiding as loyalist attacks continue.
7. British agent 'dismayed' at RUC/PSNI inaction over threat to his life.
8. Loughinisland case traded for UVF guns.
9. Jail challenge held up by intelligence disclosure ‘risk’
10. Who owns Lough Foyle?
11. 26-County State puts ‘London’derry on map for exams.
12. Son walks out of Provo hunger strike event.
13. Residents seek rerouting of parade from McDaid home.
14. British District Policing Partnership meeting disrupted.
15. Former member attacks Provo leaders.
16. O’Neill deportation may be stopped.
17. DUP minister in row with GAA
1. RSF SAY UNION JACK WILL BE TAKEN DOWN
REPUBLICAN Sinn Fein in Listowel, Co Kerry have pledged to continue removing the Union Jack flag from the Kerry Co-op premises, spokesperson John Sheehy, Listowel said on June 19.
He said that they have already taken down the Union Jack flown at the company premises after a confrontation with security personnel on June 16.
”The latest flying of this symbol of oppression and butchery was brought to the attention of the Kerry Co-op but despite knowing our objections they went ahead and hoisted the Union Jack again.
“We are now telling the company that every time they fly the Union Jack it will be removed by local members of Republican Sinn Féin.
“We deem the flying of this flag an insult to all Kerry people who have died in the cause of Irish freedom, from the Fenians to the men of 1916 and all those who took part in the War of Independence.
“We are also asking the ordinary people of Kerry to make their views known to the company in relation to the flying of the Union Jack at Listowel.
“The Kerry Group should take account of the strong local feelings in regard to this issue and desist from flying the Union Jack.”
2. CUMANN NA SAOIRSE NÁISIÚNTA PROTEST AT PROVO MEETING IN NEW YORK
VISITORS to the Provo so-called unity meeting in America were made aware of the Republican alternative, ÉIRE NUA, and its contrasts with the British Stormont Agreement.
On Saturday, June 13, 2009, members and supporters of Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta established an informational picket outside the NY Hilton Hotel on 53rd Street and 6th Ave. Inside, the Provisionals were having a meeting entitled, “A United Ireland: How do we get there?”
Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta knows all too well how a United Ireland can be achieved. The ÉIRE NUA programme lays out exactly how to unite the 32 counties. Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta handed out information and engaged the meeting goers on empty promises and failures of the GFA hence, it will never serve the ambitions of the Irish people.
Accordingly, the ÉIRE NUA policy was explained and questions answered by Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta members.
Many of those in attendance were not aware of any alternative to the GFA and were quite interested in the potential of ÉIRE NUA. Subsequently, a prominent member of Northern Aid and Provo supporters were quick to eavesdrop on the protest outside. Pretending to have “a smoke” within earshot of the picket line was not lost on Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta activists. Many questions were raised and minds open to what exactly the GFA is and isn’t.
3. SUZANNE BREEN: SOURCES RULING SETS IMPORTANT PRECEDENT
THE journalist at the centre of a sources disclosure battle with the RUC/PSNI has said the ruling in her favour on June 17 sets an important precedent for all journalists.
Sunday Tribune northern editor Suzanne Breen said she hoped the judgment will discourage the British colonial police from using the British 2000 Terrorism Act to try extracting confidential information from reporters.
The RUC/PSNI wanted information from Suzanne Breen about her interviews with the ‘Real IRA’ in connection with the shooting of two British soldiers in March.
Belfast Recorder Tom Burgess said there was clear evidence that herlife would be endangered if she gave up her source.
But he also said journalism as a whole would be undermined if the court ordered her to reveal the information.
Suzanne Breen told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 on June 18: “The principle of confidentiality and protecting sources was very firmly argued in court.
“The judge, in his judgment, does recognise the confidentiality for journalists and protection of sources under the 2000 Terrorism Act and under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
“It's a very very important judgment. I think and hope that it does set a precedent.”#
Republican Sinn Féin congratulates Suzanne Breen on her principled stand
4. SOLDIER FORCED TO CONFRONT CIRA SUSPECTS
IT was reported on June 16 that a British undercover soldier must come face to face with three alleged CIRA members despite claims that his life will be under threat if his identity is revealed in court.
It is thought to be the first time in the Six Counties’ legal history that a member of the British army’s elite and highly secretive SAS or Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRS) unit has been ordered to come face to face with dissident republicans in a court of law.
Damien McKenna (25) of Dean’s Walk, Craigavon, Gary Toman (24) of Drumnamoe Avenue, Craigavon and Sean McConville (23) of Kilwilkee Road, Lurgan, are all due to stand trial later this year in connection with the discovery of a mortar bomb on the outskirts of Lurgan in March 2007.
The three were arrested in a car on March 29 2007 where they were found to be in possession of an electrical circuit tester, gloves and wire cutters.
They were released without charge but following the discovery of a mortar bomb in a nearby field were arrested a week later and charged with possession of explosives and conspiracy to murder.
It later emerged that on the night of their arrest all three had been under surveillance by a top secret British army surveillance unit, thought to be from the SAS or Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRS) unit.
In October 2008 a British Ministry of Defence official told a Belfast court that the eight were part of an elite unit of “very highly trained specialist soldiers’’, whose training each cost £200,000.
Each of the eight expressed fears that their lives would be endangered if they were forced to give evidence in public.
The court subsequently ruled that they should be granted anonymity during the trial, with their identities only being witnessed by the judge and legal teams.
However, in a dramatic twist a judge has ruled that one of the soldiers must now give evidence in front of the three defendants after he admitted that he came face-to-face with one of the accused while he was under surveillance.
Under cross-examining Solider ‘B’ claimed that he had been carrying out surveillance duties in Lurgan on March 29, 2007 when he spotted Damien McKenna, who he claimed to have known for six months.
‘B’ claimed that while following Damian McKenna and two other suspects the 25 year-old had looked at the undercover soldiers and made direct eye contact with him.
Ordering that Damian McKenna should be allowed to see soldier ‘B’ in order to challenge his identification claim, trial judge Mr Justice Hart said: “I can see that there may be circumstances in which McKenna takes issue with what ‘B’ says, and that because it appears McKenna saw ‘B’ he should be able to challenge whether ‘B’ was there and what he saw.
“In such circumstances I accept McKenna is entitled to see his accuser, and therefore any witness anonymity order in respect of Soldier ‘B’ will not screen him from the defendants.
“Although ‘B’ only implicates McKenna, I do not consider it practicable or appropriate to screen him from one defendant only.
“So far as Soldiers ‘C’ to ‘J’ are concerned I am satisfied that it is necessary that they be screened from the defendants and that to do so is consistent with the defendants having a fair trial.”
5. LOCAL TAXI DEPOTS THREATENED BY LOYALISTS
DRIVERS at North Belfast's longest running taxi firm have been forced to remove their signage whilst picking up fares at a Shore Road supermarket after sinister graffiti appeared on a wall warning them to stay away.
Graffiti was scrawled on a wall inside the Asda Shore Road car park saying 'Cedar and Rabs not welcome'. The writing is in reference to the Antrim Road based Cedar Cabs and the Whitewell Road's Rabs Cabs who regularly pick up shoppers from the supermarket.
It is also understood that threatening phone calls are being made to the Cedar Cab depot at least four or five times a day warning the drivers to stay out of loyalist areas.
Management of the firm have taken the threat so seriously that drivers now take their signage down whilst picking up a fare at Asda and will also remove their signs and not wear uniforms over the upcoming Orange Tour of the North weekend.
A spokesperson for the firm, the first private taxi firm in the Six Counties to lose a driver during the Troubles, said they are taking the threat seriously.
“We are here to serve the whole community of North, South, East and West Belfast and don't care about anyone's religion or politics,” he said. “We are here to do the best job we can but we are taking the threat seriously and will be doing our all to protect our drivers.”
A?spokesperson for Asda said: “Colleagues at Asda Shore Road store painted over the 'graffiti' on Friday as soon as they arrived into store and had been made aware of it.”
On Saturday night, the graffiti artists repainted their threatening message and once again, on Sunday morning, ASDA colleagues painted over it.”
6. BELFAST ROMANIANS IN HIDING AS LOYALIST ATTACKS CONTINUE
THE RUC/PSNI have moved Romanian families to secret location under armed guard, as racist attacks spread to east Belfast
* Buzz up!
* Digg it
Racist attacks against Romanians in the Six Counties shifted from south to east Belfast with the targeting of a family home in Newtownards Road on June 17.
More than 100 Romanians, the majority from the Roma community, are in a safe location after they were driven from their homes this week. The 20 families said their houses had been repeatedly attacked by a racist loyalist gang.
Thirteen more people fled a house on Newtownards Road on June 17 after a window was broken. One of them, Sorin Ciurar (20) said: “I am frightened. I don't know what we are going to do now.” The RUC/PSNI confirmed they were treating the incident as a hate crime.
The Ozone sports arena, which is normally used as a tennis training centre for children, had been transformed into a makeshift shelter for the Romanians. They spent night of June 16 on the floor of the Belfast City church in the university district.
One of the Romanian men, Fernando, said he had been injured when rocks and stones were thrown through his windows in the early hours of June 14. Fernando said he sought help from Orangefield Presbysterian church, asking for help to move his family out of the area for good.
A woman called Perca was one of the last Romanians to arrive at the Ozone centre, shortly after 11am on June 17. Speaking in broken Spanish, she said she felt afraid for herself, her husband and her two children. “I am safer back in Romania even than here,” she said.
Three male juveniles appeared in court on June 22 charged in connection with the attacks.
Notwithstanding the arrests and an anti-racism rally in Belfast on June 20 on behalf of the 22 families, they were still anxious to return to Romania. Church representatives, trade unionists, politicians, members of Amnesty International and the Traveller community were among those who attended the rally.
Barbara Muldoon of the Anti-Racism Network said that if any of the families wanted to stay the local community must stand shoulder to shoulder with them. There must also be a concerted effort to stop the racist attacks.
“There are no excuses, and no arguments that can justify what happened,” said Barbara Muldoon.
“Immigrants are welcome here, they bring a wealth of culture to Northern Ireland (sic) and they bring their ability to contribute to our society. They are not separate from it but part of it,” she added.
7. BRITISH AGENT 'DISMAYED' AT RUC/PSNI INACTION OVER THREAT TO HIS LIFE
A BRITISH agent who infiltrated the Provisionals has said he is “shocked and dismayed” at the British Police Ombudsman's office for asking him why he believes the RUC/PSNI is aware of a threat to his life.
Kevin Fulton from Newry, who is living at a secret location in Britain, had complained to the Ombudsman's office that the RUC/I hasn't made contact with him after the ‘Real IRA’ named him as a target.
The threat against Fulton was made by a ‘Real IRA army council representative’ in a Sunday Tribune interview. They mitted killing British agent and former Provo chief administrator at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, and threatened other informers including Fulton, Martin McGartland, Raymond Gilmour and Freddie Scappaticci.
Fulton is alleging that his human rights have been violated by the RUC/PSNI for “not informing me of these threats from a terrorist organisation”. However, he said he was stunned by the response from the British Ombudsman's office.
In correspondence, an official stated: “I thank you for the documentation you forwarded to me which indicates that a Real IRA spokesman identified you as one of the organisation's targets. In order to progress this matter further I would ask you to confirm what leads you to the belief that the PSNI were or are aware of this specific threat.”
Fulton said: “This question is unbelievable. The PSNI are well aware of this threat because they initiated legal proceedings against the journalist who wrote the article. I think that proves 100% that they read it.
“The deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, was named in the same interview. He has been warned by police that his life is in danger. Why did the PSNI inform Martin McGuinness of the threat but not me? Is his life more valuable?”
8. LOUGHINISLAND CASE TRADED FOR UVF GUNS
BRITISH Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson denied on June 19 that he had been asked to delay publishing a report into one of the worst UVF atrocities of the Troubles to facilitate talks over loyalist decommissioning.
The UVF and UDA were on the verge of officially confirming that they have carried out decommissioning.
Loyalist leaders met in Belfast on June 19 to discuss a joint statement confirming the destruction of weapons.
The loyalist organisations are understood to have delayed a public statement until after controversial Orange Tour of the North parade passed Ardoyne.
One senior UVF source confirmed that a decommissioning statement was “imminent”.
Families of the six men murdered in the June 1994 massacre raised concerns that the RUC/PSNI had downgraded the murder investigation to the Six Counties Historic Enquiries Team (HET) just days before UVF decommissioning.
The Loughinisland families demanded to know if the decision to treat the murder investigations as “cold cases’ was connected to any decommissioning deal with the UVF.
The RUC/PSNI rejected the claim and insisted its murder investigation was still ongoing.
Nearly a year later the ombudsman has said that the investigation is still incomplete.
However, a spokesperson for the ombudsman’s office denied that there had been “any contact or political interference of any nature from any source and the office remains completely independent in these matters”.
“The police ombudsman is determined to conclude on this grave matter as expeditiously as possible and issue a statement on his findings,” the spokesperson said.
9. JAIL CHALLENGE HELD UP BY INTELLIGENCE DISCLOSURE ‘RISK’
A MAN seeking to overturn a decision to send him back to prison must wait to discover how much intelligence on him is disclosed, a judge ruled on June 15.
Terence McCafferty (40) was jailed over an attempt to blow up a car tax office in central Belfast.
Terence McCafferty, from the New Lodge area of the city, received a 12-year sentence in 2005 and was freed on licence last November.
However, he was rearrested last December with British security minister Paul Goggins authorising the revocation move on the grounds of a serious risk to the public and the possibility of further offences.
He was convicted of possessing explosives with intent to endanger life in connection with a bomb plot in November 2002.
Terence McCafferty had been part of a two-man team which planted an improvised incendiary device outside the motor tax office at Upper Queen Street in Belfast city centre.
His co-accused was shot and wounded by the British Colonial police as the two men tried to escape from the scene of the attempted bombing.
Under the remission rules Terence McCafferty was released from prison after serving six years of his sentence.
However, he was detained last December at Belfast International Airport as he returned from honeymoon.
Following a failed application for a writ of habeas corpus to secure his release, lawyers for the north Belfast man launched judicial review proceedings at the High Court.
Mr Justice Weatherup, who heard the challenge, rejected arguments that Terence McCafferty’s prison recall was arbitrary and oppressive and that the Remission of Sentence Commissioners involved in the case were not sufficiently independent and impartial.
However, the judge adjourned his decision on what he described as the heart of the application – the use of closed or “damaging” information against Terence McCafferty.
Material which led the British administration to conclude Terence McCafferty was planning activity has not been revealed, the court heard.
“The secretary of state says he cannot or will not disclose that information because of the risk that might pose to the source of the information,” Mr Justice Weatherup said.
With Terence McCafferty claiming a breach to his human rights under the European Convention, lawyers for the British secretary of state countered by arguing the commissioner appointed to the case should decide how much to disclose.
Mr Justice Weatherup accepted the argument that it was premature to rule on the judicial review case.
“I propose to adjourn that ground for leave pending a decision by the commissioner as to what he will do in light of the representation made about the closed information,” he said.
“When we know what his decision is in relation to that issue then either the judicial review can proceed on that ground or the matter will proceed before the commissioner to a conclusion if the parties are satisfied.”
10. WHO OWNS LOUGH FOYLE?
TWENTY years ago, the British government “sold” Carrickarory Pier in Co Donegal to the 26-County State for £1.
While Carrickarory – near Moville, in Inishowen – is a good 18 miles inside the border, it had been classed as British-owned and controlled since the foundation of the Irish Free State.
Britain asserted ownership of the pier – although not the main Derry to Moville road from which it extends – because it was built on the seabed of Lough Foyle which it was alleged belonged to the Crown estate.
Under its own rules, Britain claims ownership of the seabed up to 12 miles off its coast and the coast of the Six Occupied Counties. By that standard, it claims to own all of Lough Foyle up to the shore along the east bank of Inishowen.
The Crown estate is seeking five per cent of the income from the Foyle ferry which operates between Greencastle in Co Donegal and Magilligan in Derry.
Of huge importance during the Second World War, Lough Foyle was used by Britain as its main port serving the north Atlantic. The Foyle’s deep waters were particularly important for destroyers and submarines guarding trans-Atlantic convoys during the war. The Lough’s significance was confirmed when Germany’s entire north Atlantic U-boat fleet surrendered in the Foyle at the end of hostilities.
The Crown estate is also placing a veto on the development of the region under the Foyle, Carlingford and Irish Lights Commission, a cross-border body. The commission was reported to be negotiating with the Crown estate to agree a lease for the Foyle seabed.
11. 26-COUNTY STATE PUTS ‘LONDON’DERRY ON MAP FOR EXAMS
THE body responsible for setting examinations in the 26 Counties has been criticised after a map in the Leaving Cert geography exam listed Derry as “Londonderry”.
Students sitting the ordinary Leaving Cert geography examination on June 19 were surprised to see a map giving Irish population densities with Londonderry listed instead of Derry.
Set by the State Examinations Commission (SEC), the Leaving Certificate is the final test sat by students attending secondary school in the 26-County state. It roughly equates to A-levels in the Six Counties.
It has always been policy among state bodies in the 26 Counties to refer to Derry as Derry or by its Irish form Doire.
All signposts in the 26 Counties refer to the city by both Derry and Doire.
In the Irish language version of the Leaving Cert, the map lists the Irish city as Doire.
A spokeswoman for the SEC said: “This population density map was sourced in an online document from the European Society for Geography.”
The place name faux pas provoked criticism of the SEC from politicians north and south of the border.
Tom Cooper, Chairperson of the Irish National Congress – which was established to campaign for a united Ireland – criticised the examination paper.
He said it appeared to be “yet another example at attempts to re-British the Irish state”.
He said the use of “Londonderry” in an Irish geography exam was unacceptable.
12. SON WALKS OUT OF PROVO HUNGER STRIKE EVENT
A HIGHLY emotional meeting of families of the 1981 Hunger Strikers has failed to reach agreement over how to deal with recent controversy about the protest.
Eight of the 10 Hunger Strikers’ families accepted an invitation to attend the meeting, organised by the Provisional leadership.
The families of Bobby Sands and Kevin Lynch did not attend the discussion in Gulladuff, Co Donegal.
The meeting was addressed by Provo leader Gerry Adams and former Provisional publicity officer Danny Morrison as well as Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, who was officer in command of IRA prisoners at the time of the Hunger Strike.
Michael Óg Devine whose father, Derry man Mickey Devine was the last hunger striker to die, left the meeting early. Michael Devine claimed afterwards he did so because he could not put his point across.
The meeting was organised in response to recent claims that a deal was offered by the British government in the hours before Joe McDonnell died. Joe McDonnell was the fifth of the 10 hunger strikers to die.
Richard O’Rawe, who was publicity officer for the prisoners at the time, claimed in his 2005 book that the deal was turned down by elements of the leadership outside the prison. He claimed senior members of Sinn Féin wished to capitalise on the political gains available through the Hunger Strike.
He claimed the deal was sanctioned by then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher and would have met three and possibly four of the hunger strikers five demands.
IRSP spokesman William Gallagher – who was not allowed to attend the meeting – said the whole debate had brought back painful memories for the families.
“There was a call for a united statement from the families to end the recent controversy and there was also a counter-call for an independent inquiry into what happened and both failed to get full support,” Willie Gallagher said.
13. RESIDENTS SEEK REROUTING OF PARADE FROM MCDAID HOME
RESIDENTS from the area of Coleraine where nationalist community worker Kevin McDaid was murdered have met the Six-County Parades Commission about a loyalist parade next month.
A parade organised by an Orange lodge from Killowen in Co Derry for July 1 is due to pass near where Kevin McDaid was killed by loyalists in May.
The organisers of a loyalist parade that took place in Coleraine last month agreed to reroute it so marchers did not pass close to the murder scene.
The commission is expected to make a decision on the parade route within the next few days.
14. BRITISH DISTRICT POLICING PARTNERSHIP MEETING DISRUPTED
UNIONIST councillors and RUC/PSNI personnel came under attack from missile-wielding Republicans following a public meeting in east Belfast on June 15.
The latest gathering of the District Policing Partnership in the constituency was disrupted by up to 20 protestors, including a masked individual. Approximately 70 people were in attendance at the meeting held in the Short Strand Community Centre.
Protesters entered the Beechfield Street facility waving placards and shouted down senior members of the British colonial police in attendance. As members left at the conclusion of the meeting, they were pelted with missiles, including bricks, stones, bottles and eggs.
Among those caught up in the incident were Belfast city councillors Jim Rodgers and Wallace Browne.
15. FORMER MEMBER ATTACKS PROVO LEADERS
JOHN Dwyer (Wexford), a former Leinster House candidate launched an attack on the Provisionals’ leadership after resigning from the party.
The Provisionals described as “disappointing” his decision to leave the Provos less than a fortnight after retaining his seat on New Ross Town Council.
John Dwyer, who narrowly lost his seat on Wexford County Council, is the second high-profile member to depart the party in the wake of the June 5 elections.
The former trade union representative told the Irish News that he had become convinced that the Provo leadership was gearing its energies in the 26 Counties towards securing a place in the 26-County administration alongside Fianna Fail rather than focusing on the needs of its working-class support base.
John Dwyer, who stood in the 2007 general election, accused the upper echelons of the party of being blinded by a determination to serve in administrations on both sides of the border.
He said that Labour and other left-wing groupings “wiped their eye” in the local and European elections by having more coherent and relevant policies.
John Dwyer said that after failing in its ambition to double its number of Leinster House seats in the 2007 election, there had been “a lot of navel gazing within the party”.
He said that while party president Gerry Adams had made successful television appearances during the campaign, in his well-known TV debate opposite then Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell “it appeared that he didn’t grasp the economics or the social debate” in the state.
John Dwyer suggested that the party would need to focus less on promoting personalities – after its drive to keep deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald in the European parliament failed and concentrate on developing policies designed to help those worst affected by the recession.
“They need to put aside their ambitions to be in government on both sides of the border at once. If Sinn Fein (sic) got into [the Irish] government (sic), they would end up like the Green Party, presiding over cuts and as the junior party having little or no say over policies,” John Dwyer said.
The town councillor revealed that he had threatened to leave the party six weeks before the election but “didn’t want to damage emerging candidates’ campaigns” .
“After that the party headquarters pulled back completely,” he said.
“There was zero contact. They don’t like voices of discontent. But I am sure I’m not in isolation.”
John Dwyer described as “the height of arrogance” a call by the Provisionals’ general secretary Dawn Doyle that he should return his seat to the party.
The Provos lost their only southern-based MEP and lost five seats in Dublin, bringing the number to six.
Those who lost their seats included the party’s high-profile representative Dáithí Doolan.
John Dwyer’s decision to switch to Independent status follows a similar move by Christy Burke, the Provo’s longest-serving councillor in the 26 Counties.
Christy Burke, who has served on Dublin City Council for 25 years, blamed the Provo’s “watered down” support during his Dublin Central by-election campaign for his resignation.
16. O’NEILL DEPORTATION MAY BE STOPPED
A COUNTY Tyrone man may be saved from deportation after a High Court in Belfast last month overturned the convictions of two men charged with membership of Na Fianna Éireann in the 1970s. In May, the High Court in Belfast overturned the convictions of Joseph Fitzpatrick, 48 and Terence Shiels, 47 -- both from the Six Counties who were sentenced as juveniles in separate instances for being members of Fianna Éireann.
Both teenagers at the time signed confessions admitting to being involved with the organisation without the presence of a solicitor or an appropriate adult.
Seán O’Neill, 49, was also convicted of being a member of the Fianna Éireann, dating back to 1977 when he was 17.
O’Neill, who hails from Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, went to the US 26 years ago and runs a successful construction company. Now the US Department of Homeland Security wants to deport him back to the Six Counties on the premise that when applying for his citizenship, he never said he was charged with membership of Fianna Éireann.
Seán O’Neill’s lawyers, Madden and Finucane in Belfast, have lodged an application to have O’Neill’s membership charge also overturned. If it is successful it would prevent O’Neill from being deported back to Ireland.
17. DUP MINISTER IN ROW WITH GAA
NEW Stormont culture minister, the DUP’s Nelson McCausland, insisted on June 22 he would refuse to attend any events held in GAA grounds named after Republicans.
In January last year then DUP culture, arts and leisure minister Edwin Poots made history when he attended a GAA match in Newry. In February this year his successor Gregory Campbell held a function at Stormont for All-Ireland football champions Tyrone.
Within hours of his appointment Nelson McCausland, who has previously accused the GAA of having an “Irish Republican political agenda”, sparked controversy when he indicated he would not set foot in GAA grounds named after Republicans.
In the past Nelson McCausland has publicly criticised the naming of GAA grounds and competitions after historic figures including Roger Casement and Sam Maguire.
2. Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta protest at Provo meeting in New York.
3. Suzanne Breen: Sources ruling sets important precedent.
4. Soldier forced to confront CIRA suspects.
5. Local taxi depots threatened by loyalists.
6. Belfast Romanians in hiding as loyalist attacks continue.
7. British agent 'dismayed' at RUC/PSNI inaction over threat to his life.
8. Loughinisland case traded for UVF guns.
9. Jail challenge held up by intelligence disclosure ‘risk’
10. Who owns Lough Foyle?
11. 26-County State puts ‘London’derry on map for exams.
12. Son walks out of Provo hunger strike event.
13. Residents seek rerouting of parade from McDaid home.
14. British District Policing Partnership meeting disrupted.
15. Former member attacks Provo leaders.
16. O’Neill deportation may be stopped.
17. DUP minister in row with GAA
1. RSF SAY UNION JACK WILL BE TAKEN DOWN
REPUBLICAN Sinn Fein in Listowel, Co Kerry have pledged to continue removing the Union Jack flag from the Kerry Co-op premises, spokesperson John Sheehy, Listowel said on June 19.
He said that they have already taken down the Union Jack flown at the company premises after a confrontation with security personnel on June 16.
”The latest flying of this symbol of oppression and butchery was brought to the attention of the Kerry Co-op but despite knowing our objections they went ahead and hoisted the Union Jack again.
“We are now telling the company that every time they fly the Union Jack it will be removed by local members of Republican Sinn Féin.
“We deem the flying of this flag an insult to all Kerry people who have died in the cause of Irish freedom, from the Fenians to the men of 1916 and all those who took part in the War of Independence.
“We are also asking the ordinary people of Kerry to make their views known to the company in relation to the flying of the Union Jack at Listowel.
“The Kerry Group should take account of the strong local feelings in regard to this issue and desist from flying the Union Jack.”
2. CUMANN NA SAOIRSE NÁISIÚNTA PROTEST AT PROVO MEETING IN NEW YORK
VISITORS to the Provo so-called unity meeting in America were made aware of the Republican alternative, ÉIRE NUA, and its contrasts with the British Stormont Agreement.
On Saturday, June 13, 2009, members and supporters of Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta established an informational picket outside the NY Hilton Hotel on 53rd Street and 6th Ave. Inside, the Provisionals were having a meeting entitled, “A United Ireland: How do we get there?”
Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta knows all too well how a United Ireland can be achieved. The ÉIRE NUA programme lays out exactly how to unite the 32 counties. Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta handed out information and engaged the meeting goers on empty promises and failures of the GFA hence, it will never serve the ambitions of the Irish people.
Accordingly, the ÉIRE NUA policy was explained and questions answered by Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta members.
Many of those in attendance were not aware of any alternative to the GFA and were quite interested in the potential of ÉIRE NUA. Subsequently, a prominent member of Northern Aid and Provo supporters were quick to eavesdrop on the protest outside. Pretending to have “a smoke” within earshot of the picket line was not lost on Cumann na Saoirse Náisiúnta activists. Many questions were raised and minds open to what exactly the GFA is and isn’t.
3. SUZANNE BREEN: SOURCES RULING SETS IMPORTANT PRECEDENT
THE journalist at the centre of a sources disclosure battle with the RUC/PSNI has said the ruling in her favour on June 17 sets an important precedent for all journalists.
Sunday Tribune northern editor Suzanne Breen said she hoped the judgment will discourage the British colonial police from using the British 2000 Terrorism Act to try extracting confidential information from reporters.
The RUC/PSNI wanted information from Suzanne Breen about her interviews with the ‘Real IRA’ in connection with the shooting of two British soldiers in March.
Belfast Recorder Tom Burgess said there was clear evidence that herlife would be endangered if she gave up her source.
But he also said journalism as a whole would be undermined if the court ordered her to reveal the information.
Suzanne Breen told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 on June 18: “The principle of confidentiality and protecting sources was very firmly argued in court.
“The judge, in his judgment, does recognise the confidentiality for journalists and protection of sources under the 2000 Terrorism Act and under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
“It's a very very important judgment. I think and hope that it does set a precedent.”#
Republican Sinn Féin congratulates Suzanne Breen on her principled stand
4. SOLDIER FORCED TO CONFRONT CIRA SUSPECTS
IT was reported on June 16 that a British undercover soldier must come face to face with three alleged CIRA members despite claims that his life will be under threat if his identity is revealed in court.
It is thought to be the first time in the Six Counties’ legal history that a member of the British army’s elite and highly secretive SAS or Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRS) unit has been ordered to come face to face with dissident republicans in a court of law.
Damien McKenna (25) of Dean’s Walk, Craigavon, Gary Toman (24) of Drumnamoe Avenue, Craigavon and Sean McConville (23) of Kilwilkee Road, Lurgan, are all due to stand trial later this year in connection with the discovery of a mortar bomb on the outskirts of Lurgan in March 2007.
The three were arrested in a car on March 29 2007 where they were found to be in possession of an electrical circuit tester, gloves and wire cutters.
They were released without charge but following the discovery of a mortar bomb in a nearby field were arrested a week later and charged with possession of explosives and conspiracy to murder.
It later emerged that on the night of their arrest all three had been under surveillance by a top secret British army surveillance unit, thought to be from the SAS or Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRS) unit.
In October 2008 a British Ministry of Defence official told a Belfast court that the eight were part of an elite unit of “very highly trained specialist soldiers’’, whose training each cost £200,000.
Each of the eight expressed fears that their lives would be endangered if they were forced to give evidence in public.
The court subsequently ruled that they should be granted anonymity during the trial, with their identities only being witnessed by the judge and legal teams.
However, in a dramatic twist a judge has ruled that one of the soldiers must now give evidence in front of the three defendants after he admitted that he came face-to-face with one of the accused while he was under surveillance.
Under cross-examining Solider ‘B’ claimed that he had been carrying out surveillance duties in Lurgan on March 29, 2007 when he spotted Damien McKenna, who he claimed to have known for six months.
‘B’ claimed that while following Damian McKenna and two other suspects the 25 year-old had looked at the undercover soldiers and made direct eye contact with him.
Ordering that Damian McKenna should be allowed to see soldier ‘B’ in order to challenge his identification claim, trial judge Mr Justice Hart said: “I can see that there may be circumstances in which McKenna takes issue with what ‘B’ says, and that because it appears McKenna saw ‘B’ he should be able to challenge whether ‘B’ was there and what he saw.
“In such circumstances I accept McKenna is entitled to see his accuser, and therefore any witness anonymity order in respect of Soldier ‘B’ will not screen him from the defendants.
“Although ‘B’ only implicates McKenna, I do not consider it practicable or appropriate to screen him from one defendant only.
“So far as Soldiers ‘C’ to ‘J’ are concerned I am satisfied that it is necessary that they be screened from the defendants and that to do so is consistent with the defendants having a fair trial.”
5. LOCAL TAXI DEPOTS THREATENED BY LOYALISTS
DRIVERS at North Belfast's longest running taxi firm have been forced to remove their signage whilst picking up fares at a Shore Road supermarket after sinister graffiti appeared on a wall warning them to stay away.
Graffiti was scrawled on a wall inside the Asda Shore Road car park saying 'Cedar and Rabs not welcome'. The writing is in reference to the Antrim Road based Cedar Cabs and the Whitewell Road's Rabs Cabs who regularly pick up shoppers from the supermarket.
It is also understood that threatening phone calls are being made to the Cedar Cab depot at least four or five times a day warning the drivers to stay out of loyalist areas.
Management of the firm have taken the threat so seriously that drivers now take their signage down whilst picking up a fare at Asda and will also remove their signs and not wear uniforms over the upcoming Orange Tour of the North weekend.
A spokesperson for the firm, the first private taxi firm in the Six Counties to lose a driver during the Troubles, said they are taking the threat seriously.
“We are here to serve the whole community of North, South, East and West Belfast and don't care about anyone's religion or politics,” he said. “We are here to do the best job we can but we are taking the threat seriously and will be doing our all to protect our drivers.”
A?spokesperson for Asda said: “Colleagues at Asda Shore Road store painted over the 'graffiti' on Friday as soon as they arrived into store and had been made aware of it.”
On Saturday night, the graffiti artists repainted their threatening message and once again, on Sunday morning, ASDA colleagues painted over it.”
6. BELFAST ROMANIANS IN HIDING AS LOYALIST ATTACKS CONTINUE
THE RUC/PSNI have moved Romanian families to secret location under armed guard, as racist attacks spread to east Belfast
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Racist attacks against Romanians in the Six Counties shifted from south to east Belfast with the targeting of a family home in Newtownards Road on June 17.
More than 100 Romanians, the majority from the Roma community, are in a safe location after they were driven from their homes this week. The 20 families said their houses had been repeatedly attacked by a racist loyalist gang.
Thirteen more people fled a house on Newtownards Road on June 17 after a window was broken. One of them, Sorin Ciurar (20) said: “I am frightened. I don't know what we are going to do now.” The RUC/PSNI confirmed they were treating the incident as a hate crime.
The Ozone sports arena, which is normally used as a tennis training centre for children, had been transformed into a makeshift shelter for the Romanians. They spent night of June 16 on the floor of the Belfast City church in the university district.
One of the Romanian men, Fernando, said he had been injured when rocks and stones were thrown through his windows in the early hours of June 14. Fernando said he sought help from Orangefield Presbysterian church, asking for help to move his family out of the area for good.
A woman called Perca was one of the last Romanians to arrive at the Ozone centre, shortly after 11am on June 17. Speaking in broken Spanish, she said she felt afraid for herself, her husband and her two children. “I am safer back in Romania even than here,” she said.
Three male juveniles appeared in court on June 22 charged in connection with the attacks.
Notwithstanding the arrests and an anti-racism rally in Belfast on June 20 on behalf of the 22 families, they were still anxious to return to Romania. Church representatives, trade unionists, politicians, members of Amnesty International and the Traveller community were among those who attended the rally.
Barbara Muldoon of the Anti-Racism Network said that if any of the families wanted to stay the local community must stand shoulder to shoulder with them. There must also be a concerted effort to stop the racist attacks.
“There are no excuses, and no arguments that can justify what happened,” said Barbara Muldoon.
“Immigrants are welcome here, they bring a wealth of culture to Northern Ireland (sic) and they bring their ability to contribute to our society. They are not separate from it but part of it,” she added.
7. BRITISH AGENT 'DISMAYED' AT RUC/PSNI INACTION OVER THREAT TO HIS LIFE
A BRITISH agent who infiltrated the Provisionals has said he is “shocked and dismayed” at the British Police Ombudsman's office for asking him why he believes the RUC/PSNI is aware of a threat to his life.
Kevin Fulton from Newry, who is living at a secret location in Britain, had complained to the Ombudsman's office that the RUC/I hasn't made contact with him after the ‘Real IRA’ named him as a target.
The threat against Fulton was made by a ‘Real IRA army council representative’ in a Sunday Tribune interview. They mitted killing British agent and former Provo chief administrator at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, and threatened other informers including Fulton, Martin McGartland, Raymond Gilmour and Freddie Scappaticci.
Fulton is alleging that his human rights have been violated by the RUC/PSNI for “not informing me of these threats from a terrorist organisation”. However, he said he was stunned by the response from the British Ombudsman's office.
In correspondence, an official stated: “I thank you for the documentation you forwarded to me which indicates that a Real IRA spokesman identified you as one of the organisation's targets. In order to progress this matter further I would ask you to confirm what leads you to the belief that the PSNI were or are aware of this specific threat.”
Fulton said: “This question is unbelievable. The PSNI are well aware of this threat because they initiated legal proceedings against the journalist who wrote the article. I think that proves 100% that they read it.
“The deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, was named in the same interview. He has been warned by police that his life is in danger. Why did the PSNI inform Martin McGuinness of the threat but not me? Is his life more valuable?”
8. LOUGHINISLAND CASE TRADED FOR UVF GUNS
BRITISH Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson denied on June 19 that he had been asked to delay publishing a report into one of the worst UVF atrocities of the Troubles to facilitate talks over loyalist decommissioning.
The UVF and UDA were on the verge of officially confirming that they have carried out decommissioning.
Loyalist leaders met in Belfast on June 19 to discuss a joint statement confirming the destruction of weapons.
The loyalist organisations are understood to have delayed a public statement until after controversial Orange Tour of the North parade passed Ardoyne.
One senior UVF source confirmed that a decommissioning statement was “imminent”.
Families of the six men murdered in the June 1994 massacre raised concerns that the RUC/PSNI had downgraded the murder investigation to the Six Counties Historic Enquiries Team (HET) just days before UVF decommissioning.
The Loughinisland families demanded to know if the decision to treat the murder investigations as “cold cases’ was connected to any decommissioning deal with the UVF.
The RUC/PSNI rejected the claim and insisted its murder investigation was still ongoing.
Nearly a year later the ombudsman has said that the investigation is still incomplete.
However, a spokesperson for the ombudsman’s office denied that there had been “any contact or political interference of any nature from any source and the office remains completely independent in these matters”.
“The police ombudsman is determined to conclude on this grave matter as expeditiously as possible and issue a statement on his findings,” the spokesperson said.
9. JAIL CHALLENGE HELD UP BY INTELLIGENCE DISCLOSURE ‘RISK’
A MAN seeking to overturn a decision to send him back to prison must wait to discover how much intelligence on him is disclosed, a judge ruled on June 15.
Terence McCafferty (40) was jailed over an attempt to blow up a car tax office in central Belfast.
Terence McCafferty, from the New Lodge area of the city, received a 12-year sentence in 2005 and was freed on licence last November.
However, he was rearrested last December with British security minister Paul Goggins authorising the revocation move on the grounds of a serious risk to the public and the possibility of further offences.
He was convicted of possessing explosives with intent to endanger life in connection with a bomb plot in November 2002.
Terence McCafferty had been part of a two-man team which planted an improvised incendiary device outside the motor tax office at Upper Queen Street in Belfast city centre.
His co-accused was shot and wounded by the British Colonial police as the two men tried to escape from the scene of the attempted bombing.
Under the remission rules Terence McCafferty was released from prison after serving six years of his sentence.
However, he was detained last December at Belfast International Airport as he returned from honeymoon.
Following a failed application for a writ of habeas corpus to secure his release, lawyers for the north Belfast man launched judicial review proceedings at the High Court.
Mr Justice Weatherup, who heard the challenge, rejected arguments that Terence McCafferty’s prison recall was arbitrary and oppressive and that the Remission of Sentence Commissioners involved in the case were not sufficiently independent and impartial.
However, the judge adjourned his decision on what he described as the heart of the application – the use of closed or “damaging” information against Terence McCafferty.
Material which led the British administration to conclude Terence McCafferty was planning activity has not been revealed, the court heard.
“The secretary of state says he cannot or will not disclose that information because of the risk that might pose to the source of the information,” Mr Justice Weatherup said.
With Terence McCafferty claiming a breach to his human rights under the European Convention, lawyers for the British secretary of state countered by arguing the commissioner appointed to the case should decide how much to disclose.
Mr Justice Weatherup accepted the argument that it was premature to rule on the judicial review case.
“I propose to adjourn that ground for leave pending a decision by the commissioner as to what he will do in light of the representation made about the closed information,” he said.
“When we know what his decision is in relation to that issue then either the judicial review can proceed on that ground or the matter will proceed before the commissioner to a conclusion if the parties are satisfied.”
10. WHO OWNS LOUGH FOYLE?
TWENTY years ago, the British government “sold” Carrickarory Pier in Co Donegal to the 26-County State for £1.
While Carrickarory – near Moville, in Inishowen – is a good 18 miles inside the border, it had been classed as British-owned and controlled since the foundation of the Irish Free State.
Britain asserted ownership of the pier – although not the main Derry to Moville road from which it extends – because it was built on the seabed of Lough Foyle which it was alleged belonged to the Crown estate.
Under its own rules, Britain claims ownership of the seabed up to 12 miles off its coast and the coast of the Six Occupied Counties. By that standard, it claims to own all of Lough Foyle up to the shore along the east bank of Inishowen.
The Crown estate is seeking five per cent of the income from the Foyle ferry which operates between Greencastle in Co Donegal and Magilligan in Derry.
Of huge importance during the Second World War, Lough Foyle was used by Britain as its main port serving the north Atlantic. The Foyle’s deep waters were particularly important for destroyers and submarines guarding trans-Atlantic convoys during the war. The Lough’s significance was confirmed when Germany’s entire north Atlantic U-boat fleet surrendered in the Foyle at the end of hostilities.
The Crown estate is also placing a veto on the development of the region under the Foyle, Carlingford and Irish Lights Commission, a cross-border body. The commission was reported to be negotiating with the Crown estate to agree a lease for the Foyle seabed.
11. 26-COUNTY STATE PUTS ‘LONDON’DERRY ON MAP FOR EXAMS
THE body responsible for setting examinations in the 26 Counties has been criticised after a map in the Leaving Cert geography exam listed Derry as “Londonderry”.
Students sitting the ordinary Leaving Cert geography examination on June 19 were surprised to see a map giving Irish population densities with Londonderry listed instead of Derry.
Set by the State Examinations Commission (SEC), the Leaving Certificate is the final test sat by students attending secondary school in the 26-County state. It roughly equates to A-levels in the Six Counties.
It has always been policy among state bodies in the 26 Counties to refer to Derry as Derry or by its Irish form Doire.
All signposts in the 26 Counties refer to the city by both Derry and Doire.
In the Irish language version of the Leaving Cert, the map lists the Irish city as Doire.
A spokeswoman for the SEC said: “This population density map was sourced in an online document from the European Society for Geography.”
The place name faux pas provoked criticism of the SEC from politicians north and south of the border.
Tom Cooper, Chairperson of the Irish National Congress – which was established to campaign for a united Ireland – criticised the examination paper.
He said it appeared to be “yet another example at attempts to re-British the Irish state”.
He said the use of “Londonderry” in an Irish geography exam was unacceptable.
12. SON WALKS OUT OF PROVO HUNGER STRIKE EVENT
A HIGHLY emotional meeting of families of the 1981 Hunger Strikers has failed to reach agreement over how to deal with recent controversy about the protest.
Eight of the 10 Hunger Strikers’ families accepted an invitation to attend the meeting, organised by the Provisional leadership.
The families of Bobby Sands and Kevin Lynch did not attend the discussion in Gulladuff, Co Donegal.
The meeting was addressed by Provo leader Gerry Adams and former Provisional publicity officer Danny Morrison as well as Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, who was officer in command of IRA prisoners at the time of the Hunger Strike.
Michael Óg Devine whose father, Derry man Mickey Devine was the last hunger striker to die, left the meeting early. Michael Devine claimed afterwards he did so because he could not put his point across.
The meeting was organised in response to recent claims that a deal was offered by the British government in the hours before Joe McDonnell died. Joe McDonnell was the fifth of the 10 hunger strikers to die.
Richard O’Rawe, who was publicity officer for the prisoners at the time, claimed in his 2005 book that the deal was turned down by elements of the leadership outside the prison. He claimed senior members of Sinn Féin wished to capitalise on the political gains available through the Hunger Strike.
He claimed the deal was sanctioned by then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher and would have met three and possibly four of the hunger strikers five demands.
IRSP spokesman William Gallagher – who was not allowed to attend the meeting – said the whole debate had brought back painful memories for the families.
“There was a call for a united statement from the families to end the recent controversy and there was also a counter-call for an independent inquiry into what happened and both failed to get full support,” Willie Gallagher said.
13. RESIDENTS SEEK REROUTING OF PARADE FROM MCDAID HOME
RESIDENTS from the area of Coleraine where nationalist community worker Kevin McDaid was murdered have met the Six-County Parades Commission about a loyalist parade next month.
A parade organised by an Orange lodge from Killowen in Co Derry for July 1 is due to pass near where Kevin McDaid was killed by loyalists in May.
The organisers of a loyalist parade that took place in Coleraine last month agreed to reroute it so marchers did not pass close to the murder scene.
The commission is expected to make a decision on the parade route within the next few days.
14. BRITISH DISTRICT POLICING PARTNERSHIP MEETING DISRUPTED
UNIONIST councillors and RUC/PSNI personnel came under attack from missile-wielding Republicans following a public meeting in east Belfast on June 15.
The latest gathering of the District Policing Partnership in the constituency was disrupted by up to 20 protestors, including a masked individual. Approximately 70 people were in attendance at the meeting held in the Short Strand Community Centre.
Protesters entered the Beechfield Street facility waving placards and shouted down senior members of the British colonial police in attendance. As members left at the conclusion of the meeting, they were pelted with missiles, including bricks, stones, bottles and eggs.
Among those caught up in the incident were Belfast city councillors Jim Rodgers and Wallace Browne.
15. FORMER MEMBER ATTACKS PROVO LEADERS
JOHN Dwyer (Wexford), a former Leinster House candidate launched an attack on the Provisionals’ leadership after resigning from the party.
The Provisionals described as “disappointing” his decision to leave the Provos less than a fortnight after retaining his seat on New Ross Town Council.
John Dwyer, who narrowly lost his seat on Wexford County Council, is the second high-profile member to depart the party in the wake of the June 5 elections.
The former trade union representative told the Irish News that he had become convinced that the Provo leadership was gearing its energies in the 26 Counties towards securing a place in the 26-County administration alongside Fianna Fail rather than focusing on the needs of its working-class support base.
John Dwyer, who stood in the 2007 general election, accused the upper echelons of the party of being blinded by a determination to serve in administrations on both sides of the border.
He said that Labour and other left-wing groupings “wiped their eye” in the local and European elections by having more coherent and relevant policies.
John Dwyer said that after failing in its ambition to double its number of Leinster House seats in the 2007 election, there had been “a lot of navel gazing within the party”.
He said that while party president Gerry Adams had made successful television appearances during the campaign, in his well-known TV debate opposite then Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell “it appeared that he didn’t grasp the economics or the social debate” in the state.
John Dwyer suggested that the party would need to focus less on promoting personalities – after its drive to keep deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald in the European parliament failed and concentrate on developing policies designed to help those worst affected by the recession.
“They need to put aside their ambitions to be in government on both sides of the border at once. If Sinn Fein (sic) got into [the Irish] government (sic), they would end up like the Green Party, presiding over cuts and as the junior party having little or no say over policies,” John Dwyer said.
The town councillor revealed that he had threatened to leave the party six weeks before the election but “didn’t want to damage emerging candidates’ campaigns” .
“After that the party headquarters pulled back completely,” he said.
“There was zero contact. They don’t like voices of discontent. But I am sure I’m not in isolation.”
John Dwyer described as “the height of arrogance” a call by the Provisionals’ general secretary Dawn Doyle that he should return his seat to the party.
The Provos lost their only southern-based MEP and lost five seats in Dublin, bringing the number to six.
Those who lost their seats included the party’s high-profile representative Dáithí Doolan.
John Dwyer’s decision to switch to Independent status follows a similar move by Christy Burke, the Provo’s longest-serving councillor in the 26 Counties.
Christy Burke, who has served on Dublin City Council for 25 years, blamed the Provo’s “watered down” support during his Dublin Central by-election campaign for his resignation.
16. O’NEILL DEPORTATION MAY BE STOPPED
A COUNTY Tyrone man may be saved from deportation after a High Court in Belfast last month overturned the convictions of two men charged with membership of Na Fianna Éireann in the 1970s. In May, the High Court in Belfast overturned the convictions of Joseph Fitzpatrick, 48 and Terence Shiels, 47 -- both from the Six Counties who were sentenced as juveniles in separate instances for being members of Fianna Éireann.
Both teenagers at the time signed confessions admitting to being involved with the organisation without the presence of a solicitor or an appropriate adult.
Seán O’Neill, 49, was also convicted of being a member of the Fianna Éireann, dating back to 1977 when he was 17.
O’Neill, who hails from Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, went to the US 26 years ago and runs a successful construction company. Now the US Department of Homeland Security wants to deport him back to the Six Counties on the premise that when applying for his citizenship, he never said he was charged with membership of Fianna Éireann.
Seán O’Neill’s lawyers, Madden and Finucane in Belfast, have lodged an application to have O’Neill’s membership charge also overturned. If it is successful it would prevent O’Neill from being deported back to Ireland.
17. DUP MINISTER IN ROW WITH GAA
NEW Stormont culture minister, the DUP’s Nelson McCausland, insisted on June 22 he would refuse to attend any events held in GAA grounds named after Republicans.
In January last year then DUP culture, arts and leisure minister Edwin Poots made history when he attended a GAA match in Newry. In February this year his successor Gregory Campbell held a function at Stormont for All-Ireland football champions Tyrone.
Within hours of his appointment Nelson McCausland, who has previously accused the GAA of having an “Irish Republican political agenda”, sparked controversy when he indicated he would not set foot in GAA grounds named after Republicans.
In the past Nelson McCausland has publicly criticised the naming of GAA grounds and competitions after historic figures including Roger Casement and Sam Maguire.
RSF news - Republican Sinn Fein - rsf.ie
The following two articles contain information and argument regarding the Israeli onslaught on the people of Gaza that we think is worth sharing with our RSFnews subscribers:
Robert Fisk: Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored
Monday, 29 December 2008
We've got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don't care any more – providing we don't offend the Israelis. It's not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel's side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.
Ever since 1948, we've been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist "death wagon" will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be "liberated". And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise "restraint" – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas's home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.
The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel's anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas's anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was "under siege" – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv.
By last night, the exchange rate stood at 296 Palestinians dead for one dead Israeli. Back in 2006, it was 10 Lebanese dead for one Israeli dead. This weekend was the most inflationary exchange rate in a single day since – the 1973 Middle East War? The 1967 Six Day War? The 1956 Suez War? The 1948 Independence/Nakba War? It's obscene, a gruesome game – which Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, unconsciously admitted when he spoke this weekend to Fox TV. "Our intention is to totally change the rules of the game," Barak said.
Exactly. Only the "rules" of the game don't change. This is a further slippage on the Arab-Israeli exchanges, a percentage slide more awesome than Wall Street's crashing shares, though of not much interest in the US which – let us remember – made the F-18s and the Hellfire missiles which the Bush administration pleads with Israel to use sparingly.
Quite a lot of the dead this weekend appear to have been Hamas members, but what is it supposed to solve? Is Hamas going to say: "Wow, this blitz is awesome – we'd better recognise the state of Israel, fall in line with the Palestinian Authority, lay down our weapons and pray we are taken prisoner and locked up indefinitely and support a new American 'peace process' in the Middle East!" Is that what the Israelis and the Americans and Gordon Brown think Hamas is going to do?
Yes, let's remember Hamas's cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel's need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges.
Not a whimper from Tony Blair, the peace envoy to the Middle East who's never been to Gaza in his current incarnation. Not a bloody word.
We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army's "research and assessment division" announced that "no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them". Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn't want to lower ourselves to the IRA's level.
Yes, Israel deserves security. But these bloodbaths will not bring it. Not since 1948 have air raids protected Israel. Israel has bombed Lebanon thousands of times since 1975 and not one has eliminated "terrorism". So what was the reaction last night? The Israelis threaten ground attacks. Hamas waits for another battle. Our Western politicians crouch in their funk holes. And somewhere to the east – in a cave? a basement? on a mountainside? – a well-known man in a turban smiles.
Robert Fisk: Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.
Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon's bloody "pacification", starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.
Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I'm talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the Israelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. "It's the most terrifying place I've ever been in," Said once said of Gaza. "It's a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa."
Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.
To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.
As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having "secret talks" – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.
Robert Fisk: Keeping out the cameras and reporters simply doesn't work
Monday January 5, 2009
What is Israel afraid of? Using the old "enclosed military area" excuse to prevent coverage of its occupation of Palestinian land has been going on for years. But the last time Israel played this game – in Jenin in 2000 – it was a disaster. Prevented from seeing the truth with their own eyes, reporters quoted Palestinians who claimed there had been a massacre by Israeli soldiers – and Israel spent years denying it. In fact, there was a massacre, but not on the scale that it was originally reported.
Now the Israeli army is trying the same doomed tactic again. Ban the press. Keep the cameras out. By yesterday morning, only hours after the Israeli army went clanking into Gaza to kill more Hamas members – and, of course, more civilians – Hamas was reporting the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Reporters on the ground could have sorted out the truth or the lie about that. But without a single Western journalist in Gaza, the Israelis were left to tell the world that they didn't know if the story was true.
On the other hand, the Israelis are so ruthless that the reasons for the ban on journalism may be quite easily explained: that so many Israeli soldiers are going to kill so many innocents – more than three score by last night, and that's only the ones we know about – that images of the slaughter would be too much to tolerate. Not that the Palestinians have done much to help. The kidnapping by a Palestinian mafia family of the BBC's man in Gaza – finally released by Hamas, although that's not being recalled right now – put paid to any permanent Western television presence in Gaza months ago. Yet the results are the same.
Back in 1980, the Soviet Union threw every Western journalist out of Afghanistan. Those of us who had been reporting the Russian invasion and its brutal aftermath could not re-enter the country – except with the mujahedin guerrillas. I received a letter from Charles Douglas-Hume, who was editor of the The Times – for which I then worked – making an important observation. "Now that we have no regular coverage from Afghanistan," he noted on 26 March that year, "I would be grateful if you could make sure that we do not miss any opportunity for reporting on reliable accounts of what is going on in that country. We must not let events in Afghanistan vanish from the paper simply because we have no correspondent there."
That the Israelis should use an old Soviet tactic to blind the world's vision of war may not be surprising. But the result is that Palestinian voices – as opposed to those of Western reporters – are now dominating the airwaves. The men and women who are under air and artillery attack by the Israelis are now telling their own story on television and radio and in the papers as they have never been able to tell it before, without the artificial "balance", which so much television journalism imposes on live reporting. Perhaps this will become a new form of coverage – letting the participants tell their own story. The flip side, of course, is that there is no Westerner in Gaza to cross-question Hamas's devious account of events: another victory for the Palestinian militia, handed to them on a plate by the Israelis.
But there is also a darker side. Israel's version of events has been given so much credence by the dying Bush administration that the ban on journalists entering Gaza may simply be of little importance to the Israeli army. By the time we investigate, whatever they are trying to hide will have been overtaken by another crisis in which they can claim to be in the "front line" in the "war on terror".
Gaza: the logic of colonial power
As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak
Nir Rosen
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 December 2008.
I have spent most of the Bush administration's tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush's final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.
The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. "All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.
I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. "The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?
In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to "shock and awe", as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.
It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country's exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today's world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.
Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food had not set it back decades already.
The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?
Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with America.
A failed American administration departs, the promise of a Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new president comes to power, but the people of the Middle East have too much bitter experience of US administrations to have any hope for change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated that their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose oppression it either ignores or supports?
Nir Rosen was born 1977 in New York City and is an Iranian-American journalist
Tuesday December 30
When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada.
Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine.
The US, then and now, strongly backs Israel's offensive, justifying it as being, in fact, defensive.
An Israeli general recently threatened to use military force to set Gaza back decades in much the same language used before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
But despite the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged victorious and the Shia resistance and social movement emerged a hero to the Arab world.
Israel is about to make the same mistake with Hamas.
Its notion of a truce with Hamas was that the Palestinians would quietly accept the siege. Israel would deny them the basic means of survival, let alone the basic means to create a functioning society.
If the Palestinians attempted to resist, they would be crushed.
As in Lebanon, Israel should have learned years ago that military might cannot crush Palestinian resistance movements.
Media matters
While the Israeli military again bombs the starving and imprisoned population of 1.5 million Gazans, the world watches their plight live as Western media scrambles to explain and, in some cases, justify the ongoing carnage.
Even some Arab outlets have attempted to equate Palestinian resistance - and homemade rockets - with the might of the Israeli military machine.
However, none of this is a surprise; the Israelis just concluded a global public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of some Arab states.
An American periodical once asked me to contribute to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified.
My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, such as the Native Americans 150 years ago, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians today, to answer. Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe what the 'other' does, not what 'we' do.
Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism.
However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the destruction of Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the repression of Tibetans, and the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Normative rules and what is legal and permissible are determined by the powerful. They formulate the concept of terrorism in normative terms and make it appear as if a neutral court derived such definitions instead of the oppressors.
For the weak to resist becomes illegal by definition.
This excessive use of legal jargon actually undermines the fundamentals of what is truly legal and diminishes the credibility of international institutions such as the UN. The law becomes the enemy of those who struggle.
It becomes apparent that the powerful - those who make the rules - insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Desperate resistance
Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the natives, be they indigenous populations in North America or Palestinians in what are today Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Attacking civilians, then, becomes the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds and imminent eradication.
The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that such violence will destroy or defeat Israel.
When the native population understands that there is an irreversible dynamic stripping them of their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can muster.
PLO, then Hamas
In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed.
Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.
Israel, its allies in the West and some regional Arab countries have managed to corrupt the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and entice them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people.
This eventually neutralised and transformed the PLO into a liberation movement which collaborates with the occupier.
The focus then shifted to Hamas, a movement which won legislative elections nearly three years ago and thus became a target for the Israelis.
By enforcing an embargo and allowing Israel's siege of Gaza, the world has effectively told the Palestinians that they are unfit for democracy.
Isolation and radicalization
By informing them that they are not free to choose the leaders they trust but must conform to the requirements set in place by others, the world community is only further isolating and radicalising the Palestinians.
This radicalisation has increased several-fold as Israel pounds Palestinian infrastructure, saying it is solely targeting Hamas targets. This is not true, however; Israeli forces have targeted Palestinian police forces, killing some such as Tawfiq Jaber, the chief of police - a former PLO official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza.
With the vestiges of security and order debilitated in successive Israeli military campaigns, chaos will prevail in Gaza. If Hamas is weakened it will not be a more moderate Palestinian group which will take the helm.
It will not be the weakened, corrupted and unpopular Fatah, but a more extreme group who have been persuaded through blockades and incessant Israeli attacks that compromise and negotiations with Tel Aviv are ill-fated.
Failed policies
In the past 60 years, Israeli leaders have toed the line that 'the only language Arabs understand is force'.
However, it is Israel that has routinely used violence to solve problems. During the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, the Arab League collectively offered Israel a framework to end the bloodshed and move towards a comprehensive regional peace deal. Israel responded by invading Jenin and killing hundreds.
Last month, Fatah launched a media campaign to revive the 2002 peace initiative, but this, too, has been answered with Israel's extreme brutality.
A Zionist Israel is no longer a viable long-term project. Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two-state solution impossible.
There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with a fundamental question - whether to ensure the peaceful transition towards an egalitarian society in which Palestinians are given the same rights as Jews.
The alternative in a few years will become untenable.
History has shown that colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and accept one state for both people, and the Jewish colonists will be forced to leave.
Restoring Palestine
Despite its lack of initiative for the Middle East peace process, the White House has in recent years been unable to dislodge the occupation of Palestine as the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond.
It is the common denominator by which Arab populist policies are shaped. Invading Iraq or offering economic benefits to frontline states will not make the Palestinian issue go away.
During my travels and research, I have spoken with jihadists in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere; they all mentioned the Palestinian struggle as one of their motivations.
The US will pay a price for backing Israel. Soon the so-called moderate Arab dictatorships that collaborate with the US hegemony in the region will find themselves in untenable positions.
Loss of credibility
Already we see tensions increasing in the region. Damascus has pulled out of third-party talks with Tel Aviv and Arab anger has been mounting not just at Israel, and not just at America, but also at their own regimes which have collaborated with Washington.
Some Israelis have started to realise their government's flawed approach. While 81 per cent of Israelis support the military campaign, a poll has showed only 39 per cent believe it will succeed in removing Hamas or reducing violence.
An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli daily, even went so far as to label Israel "the region's bully".
Barack Obama, the US president-elect, remains silent as Israel kills Palestinians with impunity. In his silence he expresses his complicity.
Nir Rosen is a Beirut-based journalist, fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and the author of The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter's Journey into Occupied Iraq.
The following two articles contain information and argument regarding the Israeli onslaught on the people of Gaza that we think is worth sharing with our RSFnews subscribers:
Robert Fisk: Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored
Monday, 29 December 2008
We've got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don't care any more – providing we don't offend the Israelis. It's not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel's side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.
Ever since 1948, we've been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist "death wagon" will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be "liberated". And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise "restraint" – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas's home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.
The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel's anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas's anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was "under siege" – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv.
By last night, the exchange rate stood at 296 Palestinians dead for one dead Israeli. Back in 2006, it was 10 Lebanese dead for one Israeli dead. This weekend was the most inflationary exchange rate in a single day since – the 1973 Middle East War? The 1967 Six Day War? The 1956 Suez War? The 1948 Independence/Nakba War? It's obscene, a gruesome game – which Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, unconsciously admitted when he spoke this weekend to Fox TV. "Our intention is to totally change the rules of the game," Barak said.
Exactly. Only the "rules" of the game don't change. This is a further slippage on the Arab-Israeli exchanges, a percentage slide more awesome than Wall Street's crashing shares, though of not much interest in the US which – let us remember – made the F-18s and the Hellfire missiles which the Bush administration pleads with Israel to use sparingly.
Quite a lot of the dead this weekend appear to have been Hamas members, but what is it supposed to solve? Is Hamas going to say: "Wow, this blitz is awesome – we'd better recognise the state of Israel, fall in line with the Palestinian Authority, lay down our weapons and pray we are taken prisoner and locked up indefinitely and support a new American 'peace process' in the Middle East!" Is that what the Israelis and the Americans and Gordon Brown think Hamas is going to do?
Yes, let's remember Hamas's cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel's need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges.
Not a whimper from Tony Blair, the peace envoy to the Middle East who's never been to Gaza in his current incarnation. Not a bloody word.
We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army's "research and assessment division" announced that "no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them". Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn't want to lower ourselves to the IRA's level.
Yes, Israel deserves security. But these bloodbaths will not bring it. Not since 1948 have air raids protected Israel. Israel has bombed Lebanon thousands of times since 1975 and not one has eliminated "terrorism". So what was the reaction last night? The Israelis threaten ground attacks. Hamas waits for another battle. Our Western politicians crouch in their funk holes. And somewhere to the east – in a cave? a basement? on a mountainside? – a well-known man in a turban smiles.
Robert Fisk: Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.
Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon's bloody "pacification", starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.
Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I'm talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the Israelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. "It's the most terrifying place I've ever been in," Said once said of Gaza. "It's a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa."
Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.
To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.
As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having "secret talks" – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.
Robert Fisk: Keeping out the cameras and reporters simply doesn't work
Monday January 5, 2009
What is Israel afraid of? Using the old "enclosed military area" excuse to prevent coverage of its occupation of Palestinian land has been going on for years. But the last time Israel played this game – in Jenin in 2000 – it was a disaster. Prevented from seeing the truth with their own eyes, reporters quoted Palestinians who claimed there had been a massacre by Israeli soldiers – and Israel spent years denying it. In fact, there was a massacre, but not on the scale that it was originally reported.
Now the Israeli army is trying the same doomed tactic again. Ban the press. Keep the cameras out. By yesterday morning, only hours after the Israeli army went clanking into Gaza to kill more Hamas members – and, of course, more civilians – Hamas was reporting the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Reporters on the ground could have sorted out the truth or the lie about that. But without a single Western journalist in Gaza, the Israelis were left to tell the world that they didn't know if the story was true.
On the other hand, the Israelis are so ruthless that the reasons for the ban on journalism may be quite easily explained: that so many Israeli soldiers are going to kill so many innocents – more than three score by last night, and that's only the ones we know about – that images of the slaughter would be too much to tolerate. Not that the Palestinians have done much to help. The kidnapping by a Palestinian mafia family of the BBC's man in Gaza – finally released by Hamas, although that's not being recalled right now – put paid to any permanent Western television presence in Gaza months ago. Yet the results are the same.
Back in 1980, the Soviet Union threw every Western journalist out of Afghanistan. Those of us who had been reporting the Russian invasion and its brutal aftermath could not re-enter the country – except with the mujahedin guerrillas. I received a letter from Charles Douglas-Hume, who was editor of the The Times – for which I then worked – making an important observation. "Now that we have no regular coverage from Afghanistan," he noted on 26 March that year, "I would be grateful if you could make sure that we do not miss any opportunity for reporting on reliable accounts of what is going on in that country. We must not let events in Afghanistan vanish from the paper simply because we have no correspondent there."
That the Israelis should use an old Soviet tactic to blind the world's vision of war may not be surprising. But the result is that Palestinian voices – as opposed to those of Western reporters – are now dominating the airwaves. The men and women who are under air and artillery attack by the Israelis are now telling their own story on television and radio and in the papers as they have never been able to tell it before, without the artificial "balance", which so much television journalism imposes on live reporting. Perhaps this will become a new form of coverage – letting the participants tell their own story. The flip side, of course, is that there is no Westerner in Gaza to cross-question Hamas's devious account of events: another victory for the Palestinian militia, handed to them on a plate by the Israelis.
But there is also a darker side. Israel's version of events has been given so much credence by the dying Bush administration that the ban on journalists entering Gaza may simply be of little importance to the Israeli army. By the time we investigate, whatever they are trying to hide will have been overtaken by another crisis in which they can claim to be in the "front line" in the "war on terror".
Gaza: the logic of colonial power
As so often, the term 'terrorism' has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak
Nir Rosen
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 December 2008.
I have spent most of the Bush administration's tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush's final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.
The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. "All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said.
I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.
Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. "The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?
In September, Bush spoke at the United Nations. No cause could justify the deliberate taking of human life, he said. Yet the US has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes on populated areas. When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some "collateral" civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate. When you impose sanctions, as the US did on Saddam era Iraq, that kill hundreds of thousands, and then say their deaths were worth it, as secretary of state Albright did, then you are deliberately killing people for a political goal. When you seek to "shock and awe", as president Bush did, when he bombed Iraq, you are engaging in terrorism.
Just as the traditional American cowboy film presented white Americans under siege, with Indians as the aggressors, which was the opposite of reality, so, too, have Palestinians become the aggressors and not the victims. Beginning in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed, and their land was settled by colonists, who went on to deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world. Every day, more of Palestine is stolen, more Palestinians are killed. To call oneself an Israeli Zionist is to engage in the dispossession of entire people. It is not that, qua Palestinians, they have the right to use any means necessary, it is because they are weak. The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.
It is impossible to make a universal ethical claim or establish a Kantian principle justifying any act to resist colonialism or domination by overwhelming power. And there are other questions I have trouble answering. Can an Iraqi be justified in attacking the United States? After all, his country was attacked without provocation, and destroyed, with millions of refugees created, hundreds of thousands of dead. And this, after 12 years of bombings and sanctions, which killed many and destroyed the lives of many others.
I could argue that all Americans are benefiting from their country's exploits without having to pay the price, and that, in today's world, the imperial machine is not merely the military but a military-civilian network. And I could also say that Americans elected the Bush administration twice and elected representatives who did nothing to stop the war, and the American people themselves did nothing. From the perspective of an American, or an Israeli, or other powerful aggressors, if you are strong, everything you do is justifiable, and nothing the weak do is legitimate. It's merely a question of what side you choose: the side of the strong or the side of the weak.
Israel and its allies in the west and in Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have managed to corrupt the PLO leadership, to suborn them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people, creating a first – a liberation movement that collaborated with the occupier. Israeli elections are coming up and, as usual, these elections are accompanied by war to bolster the candidates. You cannot be prime minister of Israel without enough Arab blood on your hands. An Israeli general has threatened to set Gaza back decades, just as they threatened to set Lebanon back decades in 2006. As if strangling Gaza and denying its people fuel, power or food had not set it back decades already.
The democratically elected Hamas government was targeted for destruction from the day it won the elections in 2006. The world told the Palestinians that they cannot have democracy, as if the goal was to radicalise them further and as if that would not have a consequence. Israel claims it is targeting Hamas's military forces. This is not true. It is targeting Palestinian police forces and killing them, including some such as the chief of police, Tawfiq Jaber, who was actually a former Fatah official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza. What will happen to a society with no security forces? What do the Israelis expect to happen when forces more radical than Hamas gain power?
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?
Do not be deceived: the persistence of the Palestine problem is the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond. But now the Bush administration has added Iraq and Afghanistan as additional grievances. America has lost its influence on the Arab masses, even if it can still apply pressure on Arab regimes. But reformists and elites in the Arab world want nothing to do with America.
A failed American administration departs, the promise of a Palestinian state a lie, as more Palestinians are murdered. A new president comes to power, but the people of the Middle East have too much bitter experience of US administrations to have any hope for change. President-elect Obama, Vice President-elect Biden and incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton have not demonstrated that their view of the Middle East is at all different from previous administrations. As the world prepares to celebrate a new year, how long before it is once again made to feel the pain of those whose oppression it either ignores or supports?
Nir Rosen was born 1977 in New York City and is an Iranian-American journalist
Tuesday December 30
When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada.
Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine.
The US, then and now, strongly backs Israel's offensive, justifying it as being, in fact, defensive.
An Israeli general recently threatened to use military force to set Gaza back decades in much the same language used before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
But despite the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged victorious and the Shia resistance and social movement emerged a hero to the Arab world.
Israel is about to make the same mistake with Hamas.
Its notion of a truce with Hamas was that the Palestinians would quietly accept the siege. Israel would deny them the basic means of survival, let alone the basic means to create a functioning society.
If the Palestinians attempted to resist, they would be crushed.
As in Lebanon, Israel should have learned years ago that military might cannot crush Palestinian resistance movements.
Media matters
While the Israeli military again bombs the starving and imprisoned population of 1.5 million Gazans, the world watches their plight live as Western media scrambles to explain and, in some cases, justify the ongoing carnage.
Even some Arab outlets have attempted to equate Palestinian resistance - and homemade rockets - with the might of the Israeli military machine.
However, none of this is a surprise; the Israelis just concluded a global public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of some Arab states.
An American periodical once asked me to contribute to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified.
My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, such as the Native Americans 150 years ago, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians today, to answer. Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe what the 'other' does, not what 'we' do.
Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism.
However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the destruction of Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the repression of Tibetans, and the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Normative rules and what is legal and permissible are determined by the powerful. They formulate the concept of terrorism in normative terms and make it appear as if a neutral court derived such definitions instead of the oppressors.
For the weak to resist becomes illegal by definition.
This excessive use of legal jargon actually undermines the fundamentals of what is truly legal and diminishes the credibility of international institutions such as the UN. The law becomes the enemy of those who struggle.
It becomes apparent that the powerful - those who make the rules - insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.
Desperate resistance
Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the natives, be they indigenous populations in North America or Palestinians in what are today Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Attacking civilians, then, becomes the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds and imminent eradication.
The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that such violence will destroy or defeat Israel.
When the native population understands that there is an irreversible dynamic stripping them of their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can muster.
PLO, then Hamas
In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed.
Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.
Israel, its allies in the West and some regional Arab countries have managed to corrupt the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and entice them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people.
This eventually neutralised and transformed the PLO into a liberation movement which collaborates with the occupier.
The focus then shifted to Hamas, a movement which won legislative elections nearly three years ago and thus became a target for the Israelis.
By enforcing an embargo and allowing Israel's siege of Gaza, the world has effectively told the Palestinians that they are unfit for democracy.
Isolation and radicalization
By informing them that they are not free to choose the leaders they trust but must conform to the requirements set in place by others, the world community is only further isolating and radicalising the Palestinians.
This radicalisation has increased several-fold as Israel pounds Palestinian infrastructure, saying it is solely targeting Hamas targets. This is not true, however; Israeli forces have targeted Palestinian police forces, killing some such as Tawfiq Jaber, the chief of police - a former PLO official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza.
With the vestiges of security and order debilitated in successive Israeli military campaigns, chaos will prevail in Gaza. If Hamas is weakened it will not be a more moderate Palestinian group which will take the helm.
It will not be the weakened, corrupted and unpopular Fatah, but a more extreme group who have been persuaded through blockades and incessant Israeli attacks that compromise and negotiations with Tel Aviv are ill-fated.
Failed policies
In the past 60 years, Israeli leaders have toed the line that 'the only language Arabs understand is force'.
However, it is Israel that has routinely used violence to solve problems. During the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, the Arab League collectively offered Israel a framework to end the bloodshed and move towards a comprehensive regional peace deal. Israel responded by invading Jenin and killing hundreds.
Last month, Fatah launched a media campaign to revive the 2002 peace initiative, but this, too, has been answered with Israel's extreme brutality.
A Zionist Israel is no longer a viable long-term project. Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two-state solution impossible.
There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with a fundamental question - whether to ensure the peaceful transition towards an egalitarian society in which Palestinians are given the same rights as Jews.
The alternative in a few years will become untenable.
History has shown that colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and accept one state for both people, and the Jewish colonists will be forced to leave.
Restoring Palestine
Despite its lack of initiative for the Middle East peace process, the White House has in recent years been unable to dislodge the occupation of Palestine as the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond.
It is the common denominator by which Arab populist policies are shaped. Invading Iraq or offering economic benefits to frontline states will not make the Palestinian issue go away.
During my travels and research, I have spoken with jihadists in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere; they all mentioned the Palestinian struggle as one of their motivations.
The US will pay a price for backing Israel. Soon the so-called moderate Arab dictatorships that collaborate with the US hegemony in the region will find themselves in untenable positions.
Loss of credibility
Already we see tensions increasing in the region. Damascus has pulled out of third-party talks with Tel Aviv and Arab anger has been mounting not just at Israel, and not just at America, but also at their own regimes which have collaborated with Washington.
Some Israelis have started to realise their government's flawed approach. While 81 per cent of Israelis support the military campaign, a poll has showed only 39 per cent believe it will succeed in removing Hamas or reducing violence.
An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli daily, even went so far as to label Israel "the region's bully".
Barack Obama, the US president-elect, remains silent as Israel kills Palestinians with impunity. In his silence he expresses his complicity.
Nir Rosen is a Beirut-based journalist, fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and the author of The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter's Journey into Occupied Iraq.
