Genevieve Cora Fraser

Amr Salah, a United States citizen living in Massachusetts asks for your help in demanding a formal investigation into the deaths of his father and brother at the hands of 1,000 Israeli troops. Dr. Khalid Salah, age 51, and his 16 year old son, Mohammed were shot and killed by Israeli Defense Forces on July 6, 2004 in their home in the city of Nablus in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. Throughout the hours of assault the Salahs were huddled together in a corner of the apartment, contacting relatives on a mobile phone for help. Despite an urgent call to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, Consul General David Pearce nor anyone else at the consulate intervened.

Peter Hansen, the departing Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNWRA), spoke out about the conditions in Gaza at a recent conference sponsored by the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace held in East Jerusalem. According to Hansen, the situation in Gaza is so horrendous that without the help of bulldozers you couldn’t get through the debris and sand barriers thrown up to block traffic. “If you wanted to go into Gaza today you wouldn’t be able to because there are tanks along all along the main road to Gaza. All along the road you will see houses that have been bulldozed. As you move down through Gaza the situation gets even worse,” Hansen stated.

Three days before the general election in Palestine - the first since January 1996 when Yassir Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian National Authority - Abbu Mazen a.k.a. Abbas was to visit Nablus. He had waited until the end of the campaign possibly because his nearest rival, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is well loved in this, his mother’s native city. But on this day, January 6, 2005, the Israeli soldiers stationed at the Hawarra checkpoint were unusually polite as people passed through without incident or excessive waiting as international television cameras recorded the historic moment.

The saddest thing about the American election of George Bush is that in the long run it will make the United States irrelevant in all matters save that we have the power to blow the world up, many times over, through our military might.  To elect a man who has brought a great nation from astonishing surpluses to the brink of fiscal and cultural bankruptcy, whose sense of moral superiority is elitist and obscene and who in the name of Christ, whose message was to love ones enemy, has declared war on an emotion - terror - and in the process killed over 100,000 people - boggles the mind.  And of course, there’s always Zionist Israel and its minions pushing and prodding and mega-manipulating the message.

Israel portrays the children of Palestine as terrorists, faceless stone throwers, but due to Israeli policies, it’s highly complex matrix of control, the health, education and overall well-being of the 1.8 million children of Palestine are at severe risk, Adah Kay, Professor at City University, London stated at the UN Conference on Palestine held in New York City in mid-September. Kay co-authored the book Stolen Youth, with Catherine Cook and Adam Hanieh, former staff and volunteers with Defense for Children International. Published in 2004 and subtitled, “The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children,” Stolen Youth is the first book to explore Israel’s incarceration of Palestinian children based on first-hand information from international human rights groups and NGO workers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Nearly 100 Heads of State and Government convened at United Nations Headquarters in New York today as the General Assembly opened its annual high-level debate on global issues. Decrying what he described as “shameless” disregard for the rule of law around the globe, Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged world leaders gathered at the General Assembly to do everything within their power to restore respect for the fundamental principles of law – in domestic affairs, as well as on the international arena. What has irked Kofi Annan is that the rule of law has been seriously eroded since September 11, and in the case of Israel, long before. Genevieve Cora Fraser reports.