We are All Palestinians: Courage to Refuse Campaign Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - "MUTANEX Communications" Dear Friends, Please send a fax to Secretary of State Colin Powell, urging immediate Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian areas and support for the Saudi Peace Plan. You can take action here: http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/palestine/fax040302.html A Recipe For Making Peace http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/04.09I.Making.Peace.htm BRINGING NON-VIOLENCE TO THE WEST BANK http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12784 Hundreds of civilian "internationalists" are arriving in the West Bank to act as human shields for the Palestinians under siege by the Israeli Army. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN PROTEST OF US FAILURE TO INTERVENE in the Middle East Demos are being organized in D.C., NYC, and SF on Thursday, April 11 - More details at http://www.tikkun.org or contact Michael Lerner RabbiLerner@tikkun.org THE MADNESS OF ARIEL SHARON The bloody campaign against the Palestinians is in keeping with the Israeli Prime Minister's violent history. But why is the White House participating in his vendetta? http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12783 Tuesday, April 9, 2002 Where is the world to see this? Dear friends everywhere, Today is day 11 of the re-occupation of Ramallah. We hear less shootings but from time to time we hear explosions of forced entry into houses and I keep hearing the same stories over and over again. Ask everyone to gather in a room, they start their 'searching'. It is supposed to be a search for people, but in many cases they were 'searching' for something else, money, jewels, laptops, mobile phones... etc. http://www.electronicintifada.org/diaries/index.html Media compilation #60: Ethnically Cleansing Palestine? (04/01/2002) http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000/Archives2002/MediaCompilation60.htm ISRAEL: Ariel Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister: rohm@pmo.gov.il or webmaster@pmo.gov.il Fax: +972 2 651 2631 Benjamin Ben Eliezer, Israeli Minister of Defense Email: sgansar@mod.gov.il Shimon Peres, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Fax: +972-2-5303367 Email: sar@mfa.gov.il Here is the phone number of the IDF Commander for the Ramallah area (from the US): 011-972-2-9970461 Mobile: 011-972-54-240-303 Voice your protest to him personally. We Are All Palestinians The so-called terrorists that Sharon alleged to be after suddenly grew to be become the entire population of the camps. By the end of the fifth day of the killing campaign, 50 Palestinian deaths and 450 wounded later, we were told, oops, the "terrorists" managed to escape. http://www.palestinechronicle.com/ International Volunteers Form 'Human Shield' for Palestinian Families by Peter Beaumont and Martin Wainwright / Guardian of London More than 200 international volunteers, including some 50 Britons, deployed themselves in Ramallah and two refugee camps at Bethlehem Sunday night in an attempt to form "human shields" for Palestinian families. The British contingent, ranging from a retired nurse from Kent to a group of students from Manchester, joined Americans and Europeans dispersed among houses close to Yasser Arafat's headquarters and Israeli army tank formations near Bethlehem's Azar and Aida refugee camps. Israel ordered all foreign volunteers and journalists to leave Ramallah Sunday, as another media worker was shot and wounded while covering the fighting in the city. Statement from U.S. Veterans to Israeli Troops "What Israel is doing now is a war crime" - Israeli Refusenik You are at war. You are being ordered to shoot on site anything that moves. Palestinian children, reporters, ambulance drivers and international observers are all in your rifle sites. There will be more blood flowing and much of it will be on your hands. As veterans of U.S. imperialism, we also know what it is like to be ordered into battle against a people fighting for their land and liberation. We learned the hard way that this is the wrong kind of fight to fight. The situation in Palestine is at a dangerous flashpoint. What you are being asked to carry out is not Israeli self-defense but naked aggression and the massacre of Palestine. As a result of these actions the whole region may well erupt in all out war. Now there is even talk of Israeli's using nuclear weapons--bigger bombs mean more deaths! Today's all out war was planned and provoked by the Israeli government. Sharon's armed provocation, which started the fighting and brought him to power was a deliberate way to initiate and then legitimize this war. A war that now threatens the U.S. plans for Iraq. The Middle East region has always been important to the strategic interests of the U.S. and Israel has always had a free hand in "doing the dirty work". Israel was created with and continues to receive the support of the U.S. government because Israel acts as a junior tner to the U.S in the Middle East. Like the U.S., Israel is an imperialist power, where "self-defense" means enforcing imperialist interests in the region. The U.S. is seeking to strengthen its political and military domination in the Middle East as the oil resources of this region and Central Asia are key lifelines of the world economy. The U.S. also seeks this to further its "interests" in all surrounding regions. Now Israel is waging a key t of the U.S.'s global "war on terrorism"emdash an open-ended campaign of terror against people in as many as 60 countries. At the top of the U.S. list is Iraq-- where over ten years of sanctions, with the resulting deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent infants and children, have failed to force Iraq to capitulate to U.S. demands. After thousands of missile attacks and bombings of so-called military targets like dams, power stations, etc.; these criminals are now preing to escalate their war on Iraq with a full scale invasion, while threatening its neighbors Iran and Syria. Sharon and the U.S. government claim that the central problem in Palestine is "violence". The real "problem" is that the Palestinians refuse to lie down and abandon their just struggle against Israeli occupation of their land and domination of their lives. As soldiers you are taught to regard Palestinians as sub-human, but isn't that exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944? Now you are invading the Deheishe refugee camp on the West Bank in the middle of the night with tanks and Apache helicopter gun ships. Some 600 men from Deheishe were rounded up, blindfolded and handcuffed as Israeli soldiers wrote numbers on their arms and foreheads. None of us can miss the chilling allel to the Nazi's tattooing ID numbers on prisoners in the concentration camps. What about you? The U.S. murders thousands of Iraqi's each month. Will you do the same to the Palestinians? Will you be able to live with yourself afterward? You have a choice to make: either stand with Sharon and the attempt to liquidate a people or stand with the people of the world and refuse to ticipate in acts of genocide. Over one thousand of your comrades--refuseniks--have taken the heroic stand of refusing to serve in the occupied territories adding to the history of soldiers' resistance, which spans countries and wars. VVAWAI stands with and salutes all those who resist while in uniform. We know the importance that resistance within a military has on its ability to wage war. Many of us faced similar decisions and, like the refuseniks, made the hard choices. That's why we are anti-imperialists now. To us, the real heroes of any imperialist war are the GI resisters, those who refuse to "just follow orders". The reasons why these refuseniks are taking this stand are as many and varied as the people involved, however the importance is the action itself. With their stand, the refuseniks join the proud legacy of the real heroes of imperialist wars. They along with people fighting for justice all over the world are your true sisters and brothers. As veterans we know that imperialists never willingly grant freedom to the oppressed. We are calling upon you to refuse orders and stand with the Palestinian people--as we stand determined to stop the war-without-limits that the U.S. is waging on the people of the world. We know from bitter experience that any "peace agreement" reached with the violence and might of imperialism is a false peace for the people subjected to it. You should know that while you're carrying out your orders, there will be veterans from previous wars leading and ticipating in demonstrations against your presence in Palestine. Like you, we were ordered to "do our duty" but many of us resisted, rejecting the feeble excuse of "just doing my job". It's never too late for you to follow your conscience. You are not without options. There are many creative ways to resist. If one of you refuses orders, we will support you. If ten of you refuse orders, we will back you. And we look forward to welcoming you into our ranks. The troops that we support are the troops who refuse to fight. There is no glory in murder, no excuse in obedience, and no future in patriotism. If we have to fight and die, let it be for the world, not for the warlords. We salute the "internationalistas" -- people from all over the world, including Israel, who have come to stand with the Palestinian people as observers, human shields and protesters. They true heroes. We also salute the heroism and self-sacrifice of all the medical and relief workers who are carrying out their duties in the midst of this war. Terri Allred VVAW AI Seattle, WA vvawai@oz.net www.oz.net/~vvawai "The Courage to Refuse" - campaign www.couragetorefuse.org CRUCIAL RESOURCES The Palestine-Israeli Conflict -- by Dan Cohn-Sherbok, et al; Paperback Our Price: $11.16 Israel and Palestine: A list by raprieto, a follower of history The Arab-Israeli Conflict Primer: A list by Eric Gartman, IR/Middle East Grad Student The Mideast Peace Process : An Autopsy by Neal Kozodoy (Editor), Mark Helprin (Afterword) (Paperback - December 2001) Zionism & Israel: A list by prb, informed observer Before Their Diaspora : A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 by Walid Khalidi (Paperback ) All That Remains : The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 by Walid Khalidi (Editor) (Hardcover) FutureWorks MediaBank http://www.futureworks.mirrorz.com No Man's Land (2001) -- Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac; DVD Keep Case Danis Tanovic's savage satire of the war in the Balkans is an astounding balancing act, an acidic black comedy grounded in the brutality and horror of war. Stuck in an abandoned trench between enemy lines, a Serb and a Bosnian play the blame game in a comic tit-for-tat struggle while a wounded Serb soldier lies helplessly on a land mine. A French tank unit of the U.N.'s humanitarian force (known locally as "the Smurfs"), a scheming British TV reporter, a German mine defuser, and the U.N. high command (led by a bombastically ineffectual Simon Callow) all become tangled in the chaotic rescue as the tenuous cease-fire is only a spark away from detonation. Tanovic directs with a ferocious, angry eloquence and makes his points with vivid metaphors and a savage humor as harrowing as it is hilarious. Searing and smart, this satire carries an emotional recoil. No Man's Land "This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millenium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness." --Terence McKenna "It is in the inherent nature of human beings to yearn for freedom, equality and dignity. Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic desire for freedom and dignity." H. H. Dalai Lama "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." --Samuel Adams "We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of -- our friends." Martin Luther King Jr. FutureWorks MixFactory http://www.geocities.com/futuremagick FutureWorks MediaBank http://www.futureworks.mirrorz.com =========== ride a bike ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytact-04.13.02-10:49:28-27287