Palestinians Sue To Use Their Road. Israelis Say No!

Published on Monday, September 17, 2007 by the Baltimore Sun

Palestinians Sue for Use of Road Built for Them

by John Murphy

BEIT SIRA, West Bank - Every day, thousands of Israeli drivers speed through the olive-tree-dotted hills and valleys of the West Bank on Highway 443, a popular four-lane roadway connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
But this convenient commuter shortcut comes at a heavy price for Palestinians.

Since the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, only Israelis have been allowed to use the highway because of security concerns - though it is built on Palestinian land and, according to Israeli courts, is meant primarily for the benefit of thousands of Palestinian villagers who live alongside it.

The ban has effectively marooned about 40,000 Palestinians living in a half-dozen villages that have long depended on the 15-mile highway. Residents complain that the closure has ruined their businesses, created frustratingly long and expensive commutes to work and school on back roads, and isolated their communities from emergency and medical services.

Now the Palestinian villagers are taking their grievances to Israel’s high court, demanding that Israel reopen the road to them.

The court case, in effect, weighs the demands of an estimated 40,000 Israeli commuters, who use the road daily as a rapid thoroughfare, against the needs of about the same number of Palestinians who relied on the road for their own livelihoods.

After a string of Palestinian attacks against Israeli motorists, Israeli authorities barred Palestinians from driving or walking on 443, and they erected steel gates, concrete barriers, walls and security watchtowers to keep them out.

For seven years, Israel has sided with Israeli motorists, turning the highway into a heavily fortified corridor.

Even with the ban in place, attacks against Israelis on 443 have continued, leaving five people dead and a dozen more injured.

Attorneys representing Israeli citizen groups, who are helping to defend the Israeli government against the petition, say they fear that violence would increase if Palestinians and Israelis were allowed to drive side by side again.

“Many Israelis are going to be killed if this petition is accepted by the court. If you let Palestinians on 443, it is like giving them a ticket to enter Tel Aviv,” says Ilan Tsion, an attorney and founder of Fence for Life, a grass-roots group that supports Israel’s separation barrier and other Israeli security measures.

If security is the issue, Israelis - not Palestinians - should be banned from the road, says Limor Yehuda, attorney for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, which, along with six Palestinian villages, filed the petition against Israel.

“It’s a road inside the West Bank, and in this sense it is outside the borders of Israel, and basically Israelis don’t have a right to go there,” she said. “It’s the same as Israelis claiming that Palestinians don’t have the right to enter Israel. The same argument should apply to Israelis [in the West Bank].”

But Israel has been reluctant to give up what has become a key artery for Israeli drivers.

“This is a road that Israel wants,” Yehuda says.Full Story

Activists; No Longer Safe Globally

Published on Tuesday, September 18, 2007 by Agence France Presse

Global Trade Union Reports 144 Activists Killed in 2006

Paris - Nearly 150 labour labour activists were killed worldwide in 2006, a new global trade union said in a report Tuesday outlining a rising tide of violence and harassment against unionists across the globe.

The number killed of activists killed rose to 144 from 115 in 2005, while 800 were injured or tortured and more than 5,000 arrested and 500 jailed, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) said.A single country, Colombia, accounted for more than half the victims with 78 unionists killed last year, according to the ITUC’s first annual survey of rights violations since being founded in November 2006.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is spending millions to “tell the world that the situation is Colombia is improving … instead of using its resources to tackle the real problem,” ITUC secretary general Guy Ryder says in the report.

“They are lying,” he said.

Those killed included Jose Gregorio Izquierdo, a public service union leader, murdered after receiving threats from paramilitary groups, Daniel Cortez Cortez, an electrician shot dead at work, and farmers Jose Mario Guerrero Garzon and Hector Jairo Yate.

Violence against unionists soared worldwide, with the outlook particularly worrying in parts of Asia and across Africa.

In the Philippines, at least 33 unionists were killed in “an orgy of extrajudicial violence,” ITUC said, charging that members of the government or security forces were guilty in several high-profile cases.

The ITUC said a “prevailing atmosphere of impunity” in the country had further undermined labour rights, “with many other trade unionists facing intimidation, abduction and even torture.”

One Filipino factory worker and activist, Rogelio Concepcion, was abducted by armed men on a motorcycle and later found dead, his body bearing marks of torture.

Across Africa in 2006, the report said the “use of disproportionate force against trade union protestors and striking workers was a depressingly common occurrence.”

In Guinea for example, the report said, at least 11 people were killed during national demonstrations organised by the country’s two main unions.

Dozens of labour activists were kept in jail in China, Myanmar and Cuba for pursuing independent trade union work, while in countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, trade unions remained banned altogether.

In the United States, it said “millions more were deprived of organizing and bargaining rights” after a federal ruling expanded the definition of a “supervisor,” who do not have the right to vote in union elections.

In Europe, meanwhile, the ITUC quoted the corporate social responsibility firm Vigeo as saying that less than 10 percent of all companies fully upheld union rights and promote collective bargaining.

The Brussels-based ITUC was created in November 2006 from the merger of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labour

Full Story.

"How Is He Still Around ?" Asked of Intelligent Comm.

 

Bin Laden urges martyrs in anniversary video

9/11 hijacker appears along with al-Qaida leader six years after attacks

NBC News video

Al-Qaida has 9/11 anniversary message
Sept. 11: Al-Qaida releases a new videotape on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. NBC's Pete Williams reports.

 

NBC News and news services

Updated: 12:42 p.m. ET Sept 11, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden urged sympathizers to join the “caravan” of martyrs as he praised one of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers in a new video that emerged Tuesday to mark the sixth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Al-Qaida traditionally issues a video every year on the anniversary, with the last testament of one of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. This year’s video showed hijacker Waleed al-Shehri addressing the camera and warning the U.S.: “We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left.”

The new message, which AP Television News obtained from the IntelCenter monitoring group in suburban Washington, came days after the world got its first current look at bin Laden in nearly three years, with the release of a video Saturday in which the terror leader addressed the American people.

Later in the day it appeared on militant Web sites, with a note from al-Qaida’s media production wing al-Sahab saying it was intentionally sent to television stations before being placed on the Internet.

It begins with an audiotape introduction by bin Laden. While his voice is heard, the video shows a still image of him, raising his finger. In the image, bin Laden has the same dyed-black beard and the same clothes — a white robe and cap and beige cloak — that he had in Saturday’s video.

But it was not known if the audiotape was recently made. In the past, al-Qaida has used footage and audio of bin Laden taped long ago for release later.

Analysis confirms voice

A senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that the voice on the latest video “does appear to be that of Osama Bin Laden, according to our technical analysis.”

Content analysis continues, said the official, adding that initial analysis does not show “much new, much more than could be expected on a September 11 anniversary.”

In the tape, bin Laden praised al-Shehri, saying he “recognized the truth” that Arab rulers were “vassals” of the West and had “abandoned the balance of (Islamic) revelation.”

“It is true that this young man was little in years, but the faith in his heart was big,” he said.

“So there is a huge difference between the path of the kings, presidents and hypocritical Ulama (Islamic scholars) and the path of these noble young men,” like al-Shehri, bin Laden said. “The formers’ lot is to spoil and enjoy themselves whereas the latters’ lot is to destroy themselves for Allah’s Word to be Supreme.”

“It remains for us to do our part. So I tell every young man among the youth of Islam: It is your duty to join the caravan (of martyrs) until the sufficiency is complete and the march to aid the High and Omnipotent continues,” he said.

At the end of his speech, bin Laden also mentions the al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in an U.S. air strike there. Al-Zarqawi followed in the footsteps of al-Shehri and his brothers who “fulfilled their promises to God.”

  Click for related content

Full coverage — 9/11: Six years later
Bush: Bin Laden’s video underscores threats
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“And now it is our turn,” bin Laden says.

After bin Laden speaks, the video of al-Shehri appears. Al-Shehri — one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the World Trade Center — is seen wearing a white robe and headscarf, with a full black beard, speaking in front of a backdrop with images of the burning World Trade Center.

“We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left,” al-Shehri said, asserting that America would suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. Cont. and Link To Video

Another Mockery of US Optimism

Published on Tuesday, September 11, 2007 by The Independent/UK

Mounting Death Toll Which Makes a Mockery of US Optimism

by Kim Sengupta

By the time General Petraeus had finished speaking yesterday the slaughter in Iraq for the previous 24 hours could be tallied. It was not an exceptionally violent day by the standards of Iraq: seven US soldiers lay dead and 11 injured in the capital; other instances of sectarian violence included a suicide bomb which had killed 10 and wounded scores near Mosul while 10 bodies were found in Baghdad. Three policemen were killed in clashes in Mosul, and a car bomb outside a hospital in the capital had exploded, killing two and wounding six.

In Baghdad, on the surface the overt violence appears to have diminished. There are fewer loud explosions. But, the city is now being partitioned by sectarian hatred and fear; by concrete walls and barbed wire. Claims that the US military strategy is paving the way for a stable society bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground.

The US is accused of manipulating figures relating to violence to fit their case, ignoring evidence which shows that the influx of 30,000 troops has done little to end the continuing bloodshed.

The death of Omar al-Husseini in the Huriya district of Baghdad is one of many which does not even figure in the American reckoning. His killers, masked and carrying guns, dragged him away as his mother wept and his father pleaded for mercy. That was the last time they saw their son alive. Three weeks later they heard that he had been killed.

Omar was 20. His killers were Shia, he was a Sunni, the victim of a spree of murders which has ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods through the city. But both the US military and the Iraqi police have told his parents that as far as they are concerned the abduction and killings were purely criminal acts. This means, statistically, that his death is not included by the US in the calculations for sectarian killings produced yesterday.

The causes behind the daily death toll, if addressed at all, draw conflicting accounts. Mourners carried the coffin of a young mother along the streets of Sadr City yesterday. She had been killed, said the locals, along with her two daughters when US and Iraqi government forces had stormed four homes. The US military confirmed they had exchanged small-arms fire during the operation, but insisted they had no reports of civilian casualties. Also yesterday, attendants at the Baghdad morgue did their round of collecting bodies, nameless victims of faceless killers.

Omar’s father, 48-year-old Barzan, said the attack on his son came after the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia, declared that they must leave their home. ” We were going to leave, we did not want any trouble. We had very excellent relations with our Shia neighbours, but they could not do anything to help us “, he said. “They [the Mehdi Army] were also saying that my two sons were involved with the insurgents. That was not true, they had nothing to do with politics. Mohammed was away when they came, but Omar was there and they took him away and shot him. The police and the Americans say he was an Ali Baba [thief] and this killing was something to do with that. But everyone knows why he died, it is because we are Sunnis.”

Barzan had fled with his family to the Khadrah district where he found refuge with his cousin. They could not watch much of General Pertraeus’s address on satellite TV because of a power cut. Four years after the war, electricity supply in the city has dwindled to one hour a day.

Not far away from Barzan’s new home are other houses, some with singe marks on doors and windows, properties of Shia who had been terrorised and driven out the other way. The walls being put up by US contractors at a record speed are formalising this break-up of Baghdad along sectarian lines. Militias rule the roost in the newly created ghettos; armed young men with sunglasses manning checkpoints, collecting levies from passing traffic, and meting out their own justice to victims who would never make the calculations on the effects of the surge.

The Americans at first welcomed the forming of the vigilante groups, calling them “guardians”; in some areas this was described as part of the ” Sunni awakening”, away from the insurgency. But this began to be tempered after tales of extortion began to surface, and now some have been arrested for “suspected al-Qa’ida ties”. Full Story