De Israelische Terreur 17

De Amerikaanse journalist Mike Whitney schrijft: 'Olmert should have stayed Home
-- Ehud Olmert never should have been invited to Washington. He shouldn’t have been given a platform to spout his defiance of UN resolutions. The Bush administration does the country a disservice by rewarding leaders who ignore the international community and carry out their own self-serving agenda. This doesn’t mean that Israel should be bombed into the Stone Age like Iraq, or that Olmert should be targeted for regime change. And, it doesn’t mean that the Israeli people should be collectively punished with lethal sanctions like those that are being levied against the Palestinians. It simply means that Israel should be isolated as much as possible until it complies with UN resolutions to return to the 1967 borders. Olmert’s appearance in Washington is a setback for the United States as well as the cause of peace in the Middle East. It undermines our credibility in the Muslim world and makes our foreign policy look hypocritical. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the center of the turmoil that is extending through the entire region. The administration’s favoritism has poisoned the atmosphere, making the battle for “hearts and minds” that much more difficult. Olmert was given a hero’s welcome when he entered the House of Representatives. If anyone in the audience had read the Amnesty International report issued earlier in the day, they certainly didn’t let on. The report stated that, “Israeli soldiers, police and settlers who committed unlawful killings, ill-treatment and other attacks against Palestinians and their property commonly did so with impunity….Investigations are rare, as were prosecutions of the perpetrators, which in most cases did not lead to convictions.” The report suggests that severe human rights abuses are being carried out against Palestinian civilians that go completely unanswered by Israel. These issues are taken seriously nearly everywhere except in the US congress where human rights abusers are revered as the champions of liberty. Olmert’s speech followed the usual formula of demonizing the Palestinians while portraying Israel as the victim of a 60 year struggle against fanatical Arabs. No mention was made of the countless checkpoints that dot the West Bank, or the thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons, or the boycott of food and medical aid that is strangling the territories. Instead, Olmert limited himself to tough-talk on terrorism and praise for the US-Israel alliance. At times his speech was absurdly ingratiating: “The United States is a superpower whose influence reaches across oceans and beyond borders…Our two great nations share a profound belief in the importance of freedom and a common pioneering spirit deeply rooted in optimism….It is impossible to think of a world in which America was not there, in the honorable service of humanity.” Behind the smarmy rhetoric, though, Olmert was busy giving the US another black-eye by authorizing more violence in the occupied territories. As he delivered his speech the AP reported another attack in Gaza. This time, three Palestinian civilians in the same family were killed in an air raid on an alleged terror suspect. Nahed Mahani and his family were out driving his new car when the vehicle was hit by shrapnel from a surface-to-air missile fired from an unmanned drone. The explosion killed his grandmother, his mother, and his daughter. Three generations were wiped out in one blast. The next day, another four more Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli troops in a gangland-style hit in Ramallah. 30 innocent passers-bye were injured in the attack.' Lees verder:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13401.htm