BLAGAROON

WORLD OUTRAGE AT ISRAELI
TERROR BOMBING: PALESTINIAN
DEATH TOLL NOW 700:

Following Tuesday’s criminal bombing of UNWRA controlled school buildings in the GAZA strip by Israeli forces engaged in wholesale murder of the civil population and widespread destruction of homes, civic buildings and infrastructure in the territory, the Israelis have been forced to allow a brief respite in their criminal campaign for humanitarian aid convoys to enter the besieged territory with relief supplies for the population under attack. This comes as a result of mounting outrage throughout the world at the barbarity and destructiveness of the Israeli forces actions. Israel’s criminal attacks continued today with the shameful attacks on UN aid convoys supposedly guaranteed safe passage by the Israeli military, killing two Palestinian aid workers and the prevention of Red Cross personnel going to the relief of children isolated in their home by the side of their dead mothers.

The short interval of three hours allowed for international aid to enter Gaza is not sufficient for the needs of the population and the Israeli Government knows this well but, are merely using this for propaganda purposes as Israeli Foreign Minister and would-be Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni, does when she gives her bad imitation of Mother Teresa on television interviews these days. After the three hours, the F-16’s, Apache Attack Helicopters, Tanks, 155mm Artillery and other weapons, including now phosphor bombs, resume their onslaught on the defenceless population of Gaza. The Palestinians have no such weapons at their disposal. If the Israelis think that the World will be satisfied with this miserable concession to human decency they can think again.

THE REAL AGENDA:

The imperative must be for an immediate cessation of all military activity and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.The French-Egyptian proposal for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians now has wide support at the UN and is only being delayed by deliberate prevarication by the USA in order to give Israel time to implement its real agenda of destroying the Hamas organisation in Gaza and terrorising the entire population into accepting Washington’s long-term plan for domination of the Middle East with Israel as the well-armed enforcer.

A similar tactic was used in 2006 to facilitate Israel’s invasion of south Lebanon when the aim was to defeat Hezbollah as part of the same political agenda but, the scheme backfired and the Israelis suffered their most humiliating defeat ever. These cynical maneuvers show the deceit and falsehood of the US/Israeli claims to want only peace in the Middle East whereas, in fact, they are part of a larger political/military agenda for domination of the oil resources of the entire area. Further proof of this is Israel’s active participation in the arming and training of the Georgian military prior to its attack on South Ossetia and Abkhazia last summer in line with US/NATO plans to bolster Georgia and bring it into NATO with an “alternative” gas pipeline to Russian controlled supplies of gas to Europe. While not a member of NATO, Israel functions as if it were and follows Washington’s agenda as a client state.

The Israeli spokespeople make constant reference to Hamas militants and their firing of rockets at towns in southern Israel as the excuse for their current invasion of Gaza but, what is never mentioned by them or the Western media in general is the role played by the Israeli Army in setting up Hamas in the first place as a counter to the PLO and its then leader Yasser Arafat.

Israel initially encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the organisers of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations and other entities that emphasised a strict interpretation of Islam, which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population. The hope was, apparently, that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation.

While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station. For example, in the city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli occupation soldiers -- who had shown no hesitation in brutally suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations -- stood by when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering family-planning services for women.

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war.. Israel's priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent during this period were interesting: in 1988, Israel forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian-style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace, while allowing Yassin to circulate anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the destruction of Israel by force of arms.

Israel's duplicity has massively backfired on the Zionist State as, after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, and subsequent elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006, Hamas gained a majority in the Palestinian parliament.

FearFeasa Mac Léinn

Áth Cliath/DUBLIN, 08 Eanáir/January 2009.