Israel's Peres and Amr Moussa in verbal dispute

Arab League chief Amr Moussa and Israeli President Shimon Peres exchanged harsh words on Wednesday about the stalled Middle East peace process, a witness to the row said.

The dispute erupted at a working lunch during a conference of Nobel laureates at Jordan's World Heritage Site of Petra, said the witness who was attending the luncheon.

Peres said in a speech that Arabs "should follow the path of peace like the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and (late) King Hussein" of Jordan, who both signed peace treaties with Israel, sparking Moussa's ire, the source added.
Moussa interrupted Peres and told him: "You are a maestro in talking, but don't take us for granted because we are not fools," according to the source."You talk about peace, but we did not hear Israel's opinion about the Arab peace initiative," Moussa reportedly added.

Moussa was referring to the 2002 plan by which the Arabs offered to fully normalize relations with Israel in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from territories it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

In a tit-for-tat reply Peres said: "We have withdrawn our army from Gaza and removed our settlements there, but Hamas continues to fire rockets. Stop the rockets and we will give you something fair."But Moussa rebuked him saying: "Stop building settlements.

You keep constructing settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes.

What peace are you talking about?

"Moussa then stormed out of the room only to return after being persuaded by Jordanian Foreign Minister Salah Bashir, the source added.Continued Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem is seen as a major hurdle to peace efforts.Twenty-nine Nobel laureates are meeting in Petra for talks focusing on the global food crisis and other development issues.

Refugees are the essence

Some have an almost religious faith that Israel will one day cease to exist. Others maintain that Israel will end if the Arabs optimise their conviction that it is an alien entity in the region, incapable of reaching a just peace because it seeks to dominate rather than to assimilate. Odder yet is the belief that peace is the key to Israel's inevitable destruction. Unless Israel can be delivered a major defeat just once, proponents of this belief hold, normalisation is the most powerful weapon against it, because it would then be torn apart by its internal contradictions.
There is no proof of the potential efficacy of either the major defeat concept or the normalisation weapon, even if Ben-Gurion had raised the spectre of the latter.
Unfortunately, the reiteration of such unsubstantiated claims becomes a form of opiate for the people, a mystical alternative to the summoning of collective will, the formulation of a strategy for resistance, and the proactive exploitation of Israel's internal contradictions.
Plurality within the framework of Zionist unity has never been a sign of a weakness that, if left to its own dynamics, would lead to Israel's collapse.
To the contrary, it is a sign of strength. It is indicative of the ability of that plurality to organise itself, in accordance with the rules of a democratic process and on the basis of certain principles of a national consensus.
Moreover, to add insult to injury, those people who appeared in this region from all corners of the earth did not come from a single nationality or even, necessarily, from a democratic culture in the countries they hailed from.
Yet they succeeded in creating a national bond, or call it what you will, that could serve as a basis for the rules of a communal democratic game for Jews without their polity breaking down along tribal, sectarian or cultural divides.
Meanwhile, 60 years after the Nakba, the Arab peoples, who speak a single language and who had formulated an Arab national project long before the birth of colonialist Zionism, are still reluctant to respect the rules of a democratic game for fear that that will lead to dissolution into hostile parties, tribes and sects.
The memory of the Nakba will not help create democratic institutionalised systems of government in the Arab world or realise Arab unity. Such tasks require the unification of diverse interests or the domination of an overriding interest, and the creation of identity-shaping institutions, value systems and books, all of which reproduce it in shape and form.
Nor are they part of confronting the Nakba. Rather they are a part of confronting dictatorship, the absence of the rule of law, the personification of political life, oppression and corruption with an alternative political project founded upon national agendas and capable of transcending protest to offer realistic options.
None of this will happen until it becomes an aim in its own right. However, the memory of the Nakba is important. Indeed, it is as vital to this nation as air and water. There can be no national identity without collective national memory. I stress the memory of the Nakba . If the actual Nakba had not occurred, the Arabs may have been better off and they may have even realised a form of unification like other peoples. However, the Nakba, like the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the June 1967 war, is also a stage in the formation of collective Arab memory, as distinct from other national collective memories, and it remains the most significant stage in the formation of modern Palestinian identity with all its positive and negative traits.
The memory of the Nakba has a political dimension that is rarely discussed, especially now that the current "peace process" has transformed the Palestinian cause into the cause of the territories occupied in 1967, even though that political dimension should be the most important facet of the process. Even under the logic of the negotiating process and its stylised rhetoric that is divorced from reality and captive to wishful thinking, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, even a fully sovereign one, can not be regarded as a compromise solution unless it is recognised that the Palestinian tragedy began not in 1967 but in 1948. Even a bi-national state is a compromise solution from this perspective since it recognises a priori that the country was Arab in its entirety before being subjected to a protracted armed robbery in full view of the 20th century.
To date the "problem" to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 is to refute the Palestinian cause. To acknowledge the Nakba is to acknowledge the historic injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people in 1948, which, in turn, is a prerequisite to the search for relatively just redress for this people. Justice (relative to the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948) is not a negotiable principle. If negotiations were based on this principle it would be merely a matter for negotiations to work out how to translate it on the ground. In the absence of a common principle, on the other hand, negotiations must inevitably fall prey to the balances of power, which as they stand would impose an Israeli solution. This is how Israel perceives the negotiating process and has always perceived it and this is why Israel will only accept a negotiating partner that accepts an Israeli solution. The memory of the Nakba is vital because its most salient consequence is the refugee question, which is still alive and waiting for a solution today.
Certain parties here and there are keen to drop this matter from the international, Arab and national agenda, even though it started out as an international question with respect to which the Palestinians obtained international resolutions in their favour even before the international community recognised them as a people with the right to self- determination (if the partition resolution effectively recognised this right it is also the resolution that effectively justified the theft of half of Palestinian land).Palestinian refugeedom is not a state of mind to be indulged when the spirit takes one, as some poets and novelists seem to imagine.
It is a permanent state characterised by the loss of home, citizenship, fundamental rights and hope. It is a state of obliviousness and oblivion for some Palestinian elites who have abandoned hope of victory and given themselves over to solving their own problems through politics.
In the meantime, the Palestinian refugee camp, especially in Lebanon, has become a place of accumulating misery and wretchedness in the absence of any attainable hope for return, which had justified the permanence of the camp, and in the absence of the option of resistance from the outside, which had once transformed the camp into a school of national liberation struggle. What is the sinificance of the Palestinian refugee camp in an Arab country without the option of resistance from the outside and without the hope for return in the near future?The Palestinian national liberation struggle began as a refugee movement, waging armed struggle from the outside.
The camp was the centre of that movement. Were it not for armed struggle it would not have been possible to sustain it. The camp was by definition a temporary condition until the realisation of the right of return -- a base, school and community for the resistance. Once these reasons for its existence ceased it became nothing but a ghetto of poverty and misery.
These are the conditions that produce Shaker Al-Abbasi and others, and that produce crime and political apathy.
They might also engender local community gentrification drives, as occurred in the Yarmouk camp, or they might simply drive people out, as occurred in many camps in Lebanon. If the refugee camp is to be salvaged from its wretchedness and preserved for the purpose for which it was meant to serve there must be a national project for resistance for which the camp serves as a centre. Has any thought been given to this of late? I suspect not. Certainly indifference to the fate of the inhabitants of Al-Barid River and of the refugees of Iraq, and the neglect of their fate on the part of the current official Palestinian leadership in particular, form a painful episode that compels us to contemplate such questions.
In some Arab countries, the memory of the Nakba was used to justify the inhumane treatment of Palestinian refugees. That way they would remember they were refugees, or so the official thinking went. Sadly, such treatment was not so much a reminder of the Nakba as an extension of it. Indeed, it was part and parcel of the Nakba. The Palestinians have not appealed for citizenship in this Arab country or that. More importantly, they were hardly in need of additional persecution and maltreatment to remind them of their original towns and villages and the homes they were forced to flee, the keys to which are still passed from generation to generation as they fluctuate between hope and despair.Meanwhile, the shift of the centre of gravity of the Palestinian national movement from the outside to the inside
-- and from the 1948 to the 1967 reference point
-- failed to produce a unified Palestinian strategy for resistance. In fact, it appears to have led to a vertical rift, the most dangerous aspect of which is not plurality within the framework of a liberation movement but fundamental division over the very strategy of the movement. No liberation movement can sustain this, which is a division over both aims and means, and not just a power struggle, as ugly as that is already.Undoubtedly, the neutralisation of the roots
-- the Nakba and the cause of seeking refuge
-- and the neutralisation of the role of the refugees themselves as communities were instrumental in creating that polarisation inside a non-sovereign Palestinian Authority governing entity. On anniversary of the Nakba we must not only recall the rights of Palestinian refugees. We must also remember to ask ourselves what role the Palestinian Diaspora and refugees should play in the framework current Palestinian policy

Refugees are the essence

Some have an almost religious faith that Israel will one day cease to exist. Others maintain that Israel will end if the Arabs optimise their conviction that it is an alien entity in the region, incapable of reaching a just peace because it seeks to dominate rather than to assimilate. Odder yet is the belief that peace is the key to Israel's inevitable destruction. Unless Israel can be delivered a major defeat just once, proponents of this belief hold, normalisation is the most powerful weapon against it, because it would then be torn apart by its internal contradictions.
There is no proof of the potential efficacy of either the major defeat concept or the normalisation weapon, even if Ben-Gurion had raised the spectre of the latter.
Unfortunately, the reiteration of such unsubstantiated claims becomes a form of opiate for the people, a mystical alternative to the summoning of collective will, the formulation of a strategy for resistance, and the proactive exploitation of Israel's internal contradictions.
Plurality within the framework of Zionist unity has never been a sign of a weakness that, if left to its own dynamics, would lead to Israel's collapse.
To the contrary, it is a sign of strength. It is indicative of the ability of that plurality to organise itself, in accordance with the rules of a democratic process and on the basis of certain principles of a national consensus.
Moreover, to add insult to injury, those people who appeared in this region from all corners of the earth did not come from a single nationality or even, necessarily, from a democratic culture in the countries they hailed from.
Yet they succeeded in creating a national bond, or call it what you will, that could serve as a basis for the rules of a communal democratic game for Jews without their polity breaking down along tribal, sectarian or cultural divides.
Meanwhile, 60 years after the Nakba, the Arab peoples, who speak a single language and who had formulated an Arab national project long before the birth of colonialist Zionism, are still reluctant to respect the rules of a democratic game for fear that that will lead to dissolution into hostile parties, tribes and sects.
The memory of the Nakba will not help create democratic institutionalised systems of government in the Arab world or realise Arab unity. Such tasks require the unification of diverse interests or the domination of an overriding interest, and the creation of identity-shaping institutions, value systems and books, all of which reproduce it in shape and form.
Nor are they part of confronting the Nakba. Rather they are a part of confronting dictatorship, the absence of the rule of law, the personification of political life, oppression and corruption with an alternative political project founded upon national agendas and capable of transcending protest to offer realistic options.
None of this will happen until it becomes an aim in its own right. However, the memory of the Nakba is important. Indeed, it is as vital to this nation as air and water. There can be no national identity without collective national memory. I stress the memory of the Nakba . If the actual Nakba had not occurred, the Arabs may have been better off and they may have even realised a form of unification like other peoples. However, the Nakba, like the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the June 1967 war, is also a stage in the formation of collective Arab memory, as distinct from other national collective memories, and it remains the most significant stage in the formation of modern Palestinian identity with all its positive and negative traits.
The memory of the Nakba has a political dimension that is rarely discussed, especially now that the current "peace process" has transformed the Palestinian cause into the cause of the territories occupied in 1967, even though that political dimension should be the most important facet of the process. Even under the logic of the negotiating process and its stylised rhetoric that is divorced from reality and captive to wishful thinking, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, even a fully sovereign one, can not be regarded as a compromise solution unless it is recognised that the Palestinian tragedy began not in 1967 but in 1948. Even a bi-national state is a compromise solution from this perspective since it recognises a priori that the country was Arab in its entirety before being subjected to a protracted armed robbery in full view of the 20th century.
To date the "problem" to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 is to refute the Palestinian cause. To acknowledge the Nakba is to acknowledge the historic injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people in 1948, which, in turn, is a prerequisite to the search for relatively just redress for this people. Justice (relative to the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948) is not a negotiable principle. If negotiations were based on this principle it would be merely a matter for negotiations to work out how to translate it on the ground. In the absence of a common principle, on the other hand, negotiations must inevitably fall prey to the balances of power, which as they stand would impose an Israeli solution. This is how Israel perceives the negotiating process and has always perceived it and this is why Israel will only accept a negotiating partner that accepts an Israeli solution. The memory of the Nakba is vital because its most salient consequence is the refugee question, which is still alive and waiting for a solution today.
Certain parties here and there are keen to drop this matter from the international, Arab and national agenda, even though it started out as an international question with respect to which the Palestinians obtained international resolutions in their favour even before the international community recognised them as a people with the right to self- determination (if the partition resolution effectively recognised this right it is also the resolution that effectively justified the theft of half of Palestinian land).Palestinian refugeedom is not a state of mind to be indulged when the spirit takes one, as some poets and novelists seem to imagine.
It is a permanent state characterised by the loss of home, citizenship, fundamental rights and hope. It is a state of obliviousness and oblivion for some Palestinian elites who have abandoned hope of victory and given themselves over to solving their own problems through politics.
In the meantime, the Palestinian refugee camp, especially in Lebanon, has become a place of accumulating misery and wretchedness in the absence of any attainable hope for return, which had justified the permanence of the camp, and in the absence of the option of resistance from the outside, which had once transformed the camp into a school of national liberation struggle. What is the sinificance of the Palestinian refugee camp in an Arab country without the option of resistance from the outside and without the hope for return in the near future?The Palestinian national liberation struggle began as a refugee movement, waging armed struggle from the outside.
The camp was the centre of that movement. Were it not for armed struggle it would not have been possible to sustain it. The camp was by definition a temporary condition until the realisation of the right of return -- a base, school and community for the resistance. Once these reasons for its existence ceased it became nothing but a ghetto of poverty and misery.
These are the conditions that produce Shaker Al-Abbasi and others, and that produce crime and political apathy.
They might also engender local community gentrification drives, as occurred in the Yarmouk camp, or they might simply drive people out, as occurred in many camps in Lebanon. If the refugee camp is to be salvaged from its wretchedness and preserved for the purpose for which it was meant to serve there must be a national project for resistance for which the camp serves as a centre. Has any thought been given to this of late? I suspect not. Certainly indifference to the fate of the inhabitants of Al-Barid River and of the refugees of Iraq, and the neglect of their fate on the part of the current official Palestinian leadership in particular, form a painful episode that compels us to contemplate such questions.
In some Arab countries, the memory of the Nakba was used to justify the inhumane treatment of Palestinian refugees. That way they would remember they were refugees, or so the official thinking went. Sadly, such treatment was not so much a reminder of the Nakba as an extension of it. Indeed, it was part and parcel of the Nakba. The Palestinians have not appealed for citizenship in this Arab country or that. More importantly, they were hardly in need of additional persecution and maltreatment to remind them of their original towns and villages and the homes they were forced to flee, the keys to which are still passed from generation to generation as they fluctuate between hope and despair.Meanwhile, the shift of the centre of gravity of the Palestinian national movement from the outside to the inside
-- and from the 1948 to the 1967 reference point
-- failed to produce a unified Palestinian strategy for resistance. In fact, it appears to have led to a vertical rift, the most dangerous aspect of which is not plurality within the framework of a liberation movement but fundamental division over the very strategy of the movement. No liberation movement can sustain this, which is a division over both aims and means, and not just a power struggle, as ugly as that is already.Undoubtedly, the neutralisation of the roots
-- the Nakba and the cause of seeking refuge
-- and the neutralisation of the role of the refugees themselves as communities were instrumental in creating that polarisation inside a non-sovereign Palestinian Authority governing entity. On anniversary of the Nakba we must not only recall the rights of Palestinian refugees. We must also remember to ask ourselves what role the Palestinian Diaspora and refugees should play in the framework current Palestinian policy

Iraqi wins Miss Headscarf contest in Denmark

Iraqi-born Huda Falah was on Tuesday named Miss Headscarf 2008, beating 46 contesters in the competition organized by Danish public broadcaster DR.Falah, 18, won the competition that was open to anyone aged 15 or older.

"The woman is like a diamond and you don't show it to everyone," Falah said in an interview with the broadcaster, adding she entered the competition in order to help bridge the divide between Muslim and Danish youth.The broadcaster's 15-19 online community DR Skum announced the competition in May, but underlined it was a fashion contest, not a beauty contest and open to anyone - regardless of religion.Skum then said they believed the project would display the 'cool Muslim women' who 'often make up a very fashion-conscious and style-confident part of the Danish street scene'.
"The royal blue headscarf makes a sharp contrast to her dark brown skin," said one of the two fashion judges, Muslim fashion commentator Helen Latif.Co-judge and fashion expert Uffe Burchardt said Falah's headscarf had "a fantastic and stunning colour that really shows attitude and impact.

"Falah, currently studying to become a social or health worker, said she had worn a headscarf since she was aged nine after seeing her mother and cousins wear them.Muslim headscarves or hejab have recently been the focus of a heated debate in Denmark amid a proposal that judges should be banned from wearing hejab or other religious symbols like a crucifix, turban or skullcap in courtrooms.Muslim organizations said they feared the proposed move will likely be extended to other groups like nurses, doctors and police officers.

Comedy on Mideast conflict debuts in Hollywood

Comedian Adam Sandler is back on the big screen this weekend, looking for laughs with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a backdrop in his new movie "You Don't Mess with the Zohan.

"The comedy is about an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian hit man who join forces against a new common enemy in New York City, but the question is will anyone laugh?Director Dennis Dugan maintains "it's not as crazy as it sounds," despite the fact that many critics are aghast at the idea of making light comedy out of such thorny material.
"The people living in conflict in the Middle East are the same people living in one neighborhood in New York -- except that while there may be rivalries in Gaza, they don't hate each other in Brooklyn.

Everybody just gets along," added Dugan.

"They treat each other more as people than as rival factions.

""Zohan" is an anti-terror agent and hero in Israel who, exhausted by the conflict at home, fakes his death to make his dream come true: becoming a New York hair stylist.In New York, Zohan marvels at Jews and Palestinians living in peace until a Palestinian hit man arrives in the Big Apple to exact revenge.

But before the drama unravels in a spray of blood, the two end up joining forces against a new common enemy.John Turturro plays a Palestinian villain named "Phantom" in the movie.

"Zohan is faking his death, but little does he realize that Phantom also has his own dreams of not fighting anymore," Tuturro said at the news conference.

"If Zohan is the Jewish James Bond, Phantom is an Arabic Eminem.

He has gold teeth, he always wears shades, and he has his own chain of Muchentuchen restaurants.

Basically

-- and ironically for a guy named Phantom

-- he's living off his fame not only as a freedom fighter of the people, but as the man who got the Zohan.

"The plot was an idea of Sandler, now 41, who teamed up with friends and scriptwriters Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow.

Apatow has penned some of Hollywood's biggest quirkiest comedies: "The 40 Year Old Virgin" (2005); "Knocked Up" (2007) and "Superbad" (2007).
Arab actors vs Israeli actors
"'You Don't Mess with the Zohan' is a comedic way of sort of getting at the 'West Side Story' aspect of life," joked Dugan who said he saw Jewish and Arab actors ended up in perhaps unexpected dialogue on the set.

"One of the great things on the set

-- and we didn't do this intentionally

-- was that we had many scenes that involved all the Arab guys and the Israeli guys in the same scene, meaning they were all called to the set together," said Smigel.

"Everyone would be eating lunch together.

They had a lot of passionate discussions, but it was very friendly, very healthy, very open-minded. It was really cool to see

-- some of the guys have said to me that it's the most they've every talked to an Arab or an Israeli before," he said.

"Toward the end of the shoot, I heard from some of the actors that they'd grown up hating or mistrusting all Israelis or all Arabs - until they came here."

"They actually said the shoot was a life-altering experience," added Smigel."Even though we make the point in the movie, I think it was a shock to everyone to see how much they all had in common. Look, it's not like we think we're solving anything with this film; we just wanted to be funny.

"But even for me, as a Jew, it was very interesting to feel as close to the Arabs on the set as I did to the Israelis," he added.Old stereotypes, however, die hard.

Sayed Badreya, an Egyptian actor who plays a Palestinian cab driver, said Hollywood had been a dream since he came to the United States to study film.

"When I first came here in 1979 and first sought acting jobs, the only roles available were roles as terrorists.

I was young and fit and too good looking to be a terrorist, so I couldn't get a job," he said."I grew my beard, put on weight, and got a job right away.

Since then, for 20 years, I've had one line in every movie I've been in: 'In the name of Allah, I kill you all.'"

Peace between Syria and Israel is a prerequisite for peace in the Mideast

The sudden surge in talks about resuming Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations is suspect because there is little to indicate that Israel is willing to meet the minimum requirement for peace: withdrawal from Syria’s Golan Heights.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appears to be finding a deviation from his political troubles at home with the renewed focus on Syria.The US is talking in favour of Syrian-Israeli negotiations, but that should be seen as Washington’s need to show progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks by somehow diluting Syrian reservations.
There is a conviction among many that the US is posturing without really meaning to encourage Syrian-Israeli talks.
Then there is the Lebanese angle. The crisis in Lebanon will never be solved as long as Syria and Israel do not make peace.
Even at that, there is no assurance that the Lebanese parties would be willing to make peace if Syria shifts its position after making peace with Israel.At the same time, there is a strong camp within the Israeli body politic in favour of peace with Syria.
That camp includes President Shimon Peres who has said that if Syrian President Bashar Assad is serious about reaching peace with Israel, he should either visit occupied Jerusalem or invite the Israeli prime minister to Damascus for talks.
Peres is citing the example of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat who visited occupied Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset.
Had Sadat not done so, there would not have been Israeli-Egyptian peace, Peres argues.
Notwithstanding all these, reports in the Europe-based Arabic press say that peace negotiations between Israel and Syria could resume as early as next week.
The reports quoted Syrian officials as saying that the goal of the negotiations was to find an encounter point for the two sides.
“When we say that the negotiations are serious, we mean that the other side is committing to a full withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 borders,” said an unidentified Syrian official.That is precisely the sticking point, since Israel is not willing to relinquish the Golan Heights it occupied in the 1967 war.
The border that Syria is talking about includes a small strip of land on the shores of Lake Tiberias that Israel occupied in 1948 in violation of the UN resolution that specified the borders of the Jewish state.
The Syrians say that in 1995, the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin committed himself, to the American administration, to an Israeli withdrawal to the borders of June 4, 1967.
Israel has never agreed to this interpretation.Olmert has also denied that he had committed to withdrawing from the occupied Golan Heights as a precondition set by Syria for renewing peace negotiations.
The source of scepticism over prospects for genuine Israeli-Syrian negotiations is the reality that no Israeli government would be ready to give up the Golan Heights, which accounts for the bulk of Israel’s water sources. With the deep divide between the Syrian demand for June 4, 1967, borders and Israel’s refusal to give up the Golan, the scepticism is all the more powerful.
However, recent reports indicate that the two sides have made progress.According to the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, a recent round of talks between the two sides, under Turkish mediation, was aimed, among other things, at setting a timetable for Israel’s withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, borders.Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem told the newspaper: “There will not be a situation in which Syria advances even one step (in the peace process) without a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights.
This is not a prerequisite; it is our right.
”According to a report in the Arabic daily Al Sharq Al Awsat, Syria has not yet been asked to break its alliance with Iran and Tehran had expressed understanding with the negotiations and that Iran itself was “holding talks with other sources”.
The paper also reported “significant progress” in the Syria-Israel diplomatic negotiations and that the two sides were on the verge of transition to direct talks, but that such discussions were dependent on regional and political conditions.
The report says that there had already been agreements concerning the main principles of security arrangements, water, borders and normalisation.
He said that Israel agreed that the security arrangements between the two sides would be implemented temporarily until trust is built between the two sides.Burying scepticism, one hopes that there is substance in these assertions. Peace between Syria and Israel is a prerequisite for peace in the Middle East.

Egypt's emergency law leaves trail of tears

About 18,000 Egyptians detained without charge
Fifteen years after police took away her husband, Zeinab Ahmed says she has lost hope he will return to help raise their daughter, born while he was in jail.
Mohamed el-Leithi stood trial in a military court with dozens of Islamists charged with belonging to the radical group Vanguards of Conquest.
He was acquitted but remains in jail under an emergency law that allows police to hold suspects for long periods without charge.

"Where is justice?" said Ahmed, wearing a black veil that only showed eyes welling with tears. "Drug dealers get out of jail. Murderers get out of jail. What has he done?"

About 18,000 Egyptians are detained without charge under the emergency law, in force since Islamist militants assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Amnesty International says. The prospect for their early release diminished this week when parliament extended the law for two years.
Local and international human rights groups accuse the ruling establishment of using it to crush dissent.
Ahmed and others with family members in detention share tales of months spent trying to find out where their relatives are detained, fruitless court release orders, financial hardship and traumatized children visiting their fathers behind bars.
During eight years when Leithi was in a prison about 450 km (300 miles) south of Cairo, Ahmed said she visited him only a handful of times a year because she could not afford to travel.
"I don't have money. My father was supporting me financially. He died.
Now my brothers support me," she said. Both Leithi's parents died when he was in jail. Mohamed Abdel-Moneim said it took him six years to find out the whereabouts of his son Amr, who has also been in jail since 1993... "
Tired? I have been running around for 15 years ... filing lawsuits," the 67-year-old retired civil servant said, choking back tears.
Torture
The government says it uses the law, which also allows authorities to send civilians for military trial, only to target terrorism suspects and drug dealers.
"If you knew the number of sabotage crimes that have been thwarted ... you would have said: 'Thank God the emergency law exists'," Moufid Shehab, a state minister, said this week. Analysts and human rights groups note 27 years of emergency law failed to stop militant attacks such as the bombings that rocked Sinai between 2004 and 2006, killing scores of Egyptians and foreign tourists.
They say the law has contributed to the rising influence of the police in public life and to what they say is systematic torture inside prisons and police stations. The interior ministry says it does not condone such practices and prosecutes officers who torture suspects."The government cannot live without a state of emergency," said Mohamed Zarea, director of the Arab Penal Reform Organisation, which offers free legal aid to detainees.Zarea was a detainee himself.
In 1988, he was kept in custody for 75 days for suspected links with an armed leftist group.
He says he was subjected to "all kinds of torture".
"It was torture that makes you wish you could die," he told Reuters, sitting behind a desk at his office in downtown Cairo.
"All kinds of torture, from beating to electric shocks to sleep deprivation, to being questioned while people next to you are beaten up ... to threats of sexual assault. All kinds." Zarea won a lawsuit against the government granting him 10,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,900) in compensation for his detention.
He used the money to set up his human rights group.

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Lebanon rivals sign deal, elect president Sunday

Rival Lebanese leaders signed a deal on Wednesday to end 18 months of political conflict, pulling their country away from the brink of civil war and paving the way for the election of a new president.

Parliament will convene on Sunday to elect army chief General Michel Suleiman as head of state, aides to Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri told Reuters in Qatar, where the feuding sides signed the accord after six days of Arab-mediated talks. The agreement between the U.S.-

backed ruling coalition and the Hezbollah-led opposition resolved a dispute over a law for holding 2009 parliamentary elections and met the opposition's long-standing demand for veto power in cabinet. It followed a Hezbollah military campaign this month against ruling coalition leaders which bolstered the opposition's political strength. Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, routed its rivals in the conflict that killed 81 and prompted the Qatari-led mediation bid.

It was Lebanon's worst civil conflict since the 1975-1990 war and exacerbated tensions between Shiites loyal to Hezbollah and Druze and Sunni supporters of the government.

Today, we are opening a new page in Lebanon's history," said Saad al-Hariri, a Sunni politician who leads the governing coalition.

His supporters were among those defeated by Hezbollah. Hezbollah delegation leader Mohammed Raad said the deal would help "towards strengthening coexistence and building the state". Iran and Syria welcomed the agreement, as did France.Paris, which supports the ruling alliance, last year tried but failed to resolve a power struggle complicated by the factions' ties to competing foreign states.

Power struggle
The anti-Damascus ruling coalition had long refused to meet the opposition's demand for cabinet veto power, saying the opposition was trying to restore Syrian control of Lebanon.

Syria was forced to withdraw troops from Lebanon in 2005 after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, Saad al-Hariri's father.

The United States held up the withdrawal as a foreign policy success but the Hezbollah-led opposition has steadily piled pressure on Washington's allies in Lebanon.Opposition ministers quit Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's cabinet in November 2006 in protest at the governing alliance's refusal to meet the demand for veto power.

The resignations stripped the cabinet of all its Shiite members and upset Lebanon's delicate sectarian power-sharing system.

Hezbollah's military campaign this month forced the government to rescind two measures which the Shiite group viewed as hostile enough to justify an armed response.The opposition began to remove a protest encampment controlled by Hezbollah in central Beirut. The tent city, erected next to the government's headquarters, has paralyzed the central commercial district since December 2006.

Under the deal both sides pledged not to use violence in political disputes.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, who announced the deal in Doha, will attend Suleiman's confirmation by parliament on Sunday. The Lebanese leaders had thought of holding the vote as early as Thursday, but postponed it until Sunday to allow Sheikh Hamad and other dignitaries to attend. Once elected president, Suleiman will chair talks among the leaders on strengthening the Lebanese state.

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Lebanon govt slams Hezbollah's "coup" in Beirut

Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah group took control of the Muslim half of Beirut on Friday in what the U.S.

-backed governing coalition described as "an armed and bloody coup". The United States accused Syria of "fanning the flames" and said "we're seeing now some evidence of those groups that are linked to Syria that are in Lebanon right now..," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

At least 15 people have been killed and 34 wounded in three days of battles between pro-government gunmen and fighters loyal to Hezbollah, a Shiite political movement which has a powerful guerrilla army and is an ally of Syria. The fighting, the worst internal strife since the 1975-90 civil war, began this week after the government decided to dismantle Hezbollah's military communications network. The group said the government had declared war.

Army personnel take over pro-govt positions in the southern city of SaidaIn scenes reminiscent of the darkest days of the civil war, young men with assault rifles roamed the streets amid smashed cars and smoldering buildings. Fighting died down as outgunned government supporters handed over their weapons and offices to the army, which has tried to remain neutral during 17 months of political conflict between the Hezbollah-led opposition and the government. The anti-Syria governing coalition condemned the "armed and bloody coup", saying it was aimed at increasing Iran's influence and restoring that of Syria, forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon in 2005.

Beirut will remain shut

A senior opposition source said that Hezbollah and its allies would maintain the road blocks, including barricades on routes to the airport, until a full resolution of the crisis. "All issues are linked.

Beirut will remain shut until there is a political solution," the source said.

The political crisis has paralyzed the country and left it without a president since November 2007.

An airport official said all flights had been cancelled on Friday with the main road from Beirut barricaded by Hezbollah fighters. "As soon as they open the road, the flights will resume."An influential pro-government leader called for dialogue. Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze minority, said Hezbollah "regardless of its military strength, cannot annul the other". "Dialogue alone brings results. Running away from dialogue is not useful," he told the pro-government LBC television.

Killed trying to escape

The dead included a woman and her 30-year-old son killed while trying to flee Ras al-Nabae -- a mixed Sunni-Shiite Beirut district and scene of some of the heaviest clashes. "They were trying to flee to the mountains.

Instead ... they reached the hospital, dead," said a relative, who declined to give her name because of security fears. "It was terrifying during the night. We couldn't even move about in the house," said another woman, a Ras al-Nabae resident who fled the area at first light with her children. "We spent the night in the corridor." Witnesses recounted the chaos and fear that reigned in Beirut overnight as people rushed to stores that remained open to stock up, while others were trapped in their homes."It was a hellish night.

The armed militants were everywhere shooting all over the place," said west Beirut resident Rima.

"Occupier of Beirut"

Opposition gunmen guard pro-govt detainees in west BeirutHezbollah had steadily seized the offices of pro-government factions, including the Future group of Sunni politician Saad al-Hariri, in the predominantly Muslim western half of the city.Backed by gunmen from the Shiite Amal group, Hezbollah handed over the offices to the army. Hariri supporters gave up their offices to the army elsewhere in the country. Hezbollah also moved into Hariri-owned media outlets, and Hariri's television and radio stations went off the air. Opposition gunmen of the Syrian Socialist National Party set ablaze a building housing studios of Hariri's TV station. "It certainly leaves the government weaker and the Future movement weaker," said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. But Hezbollah does not want to be seen as an "occupier of Beirut", he said, and handing control to the army appeared the most likely exit. The European Union, Germany and France urged a peaceful resolution. Syria said the issue was an internal Lebanese affair.

Normal life in Christian areas

A crowd of Lebanese citizens jostle at a bakery to buy bread in the southIn Beirut, most shops and businesses remained shuttered while tanks rolled through the streets and hundreds of riot police and troops patrolled the city but with orders not to intervene in the conflict.

Lebanon was largely cut off from the outside world, with the international airport and Beirut port shut and several key highways blockaded.

But hundreds of people were able to flood to border crossings with Syria to escape the violence and foreign governments began putting in place plans to pull out their nationals.Although west Beirut was virtually under siege, in the predominantly Christian eastern sector of the city, life was going on as usual, with shops and other businesses open.

Proxy war with Iran

Lebanon's feud is widely seen as an extension of the confrontation pitting the United States and its Arab allies and Israel against Syria and Iran, which back Hezbollah -- regarded as a terrorist group by the West.

Israeli President Shimon Peres claimed the violence was fomented by archfoe Iran to further what he said was Tehran's goal to control all of the Middle East.

While Iran accused the United States and Israel of fueling the deadly fighting.

"Adventurous efforts and interventions by the United States and the Zionist regime are the main cause of the continuous chaotic situation in Lebanon," foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said.

The long-running political standoff, which first erupted in November 2006 when six pro-Syrian ministers quit the cabinet, has left the country without a head of state since November, when Damascus protégé Emile Lahoud stepped down.

Iraq lawmakers move to ban toy guns

Children imitating sectarian divides in war games

Iraqi lawmakers, alarmed at the exceptional levels of violence children are exposed to daily, are about to pass a bill to ban the import of toy guns, an MP said on Wednesday.

"Our children see too much violence on TV, they have it on their video games, they hear their parents talk about violence every day. It is rampant in the streets," parliamentary committee on women and children chairwoman Samira al-Mussawi told AFP.Saying the bill has already been approved by the cabinet, Mussawi expects it to come before parliament before the end of the week.

According to Mussawi, children do not distinguish between toy guns and the real thing.

"They use them without knowing the reality of violence or killing," she said.

"We have to stop importing these kinds of toys and give our children others that will help them develop their brains.

"The lawmaker called on the education ministry to introduce subjects in schools dealing with matters such as non-violent conflict resolution and reconciliation.

Members of her committee, she added, backed efforts by the Iraqi army to curb the number of toy guns on the streets by going to schools and asking children to hand in plastic weaponry in return for other, creative toys.

Plastic toy guns, many imported from China, flood the shelves of toy stores, with shopkeepers saying the weaponry is the top seller, both for boys and for girls. Prices range from 5,000 to 40,000 dinars (four to 32 dollars), with the MP7AI rifle the favorite, as it resembles the type of weapons children see in American movies, shopkeepers told AFP.

Teachers say Iraqi kids play cops and robbers as do children in most countries, but that they also play war games, based on what is happening in the streets of their towns and cities. In some neighborhoods, it's police versus "terrorists", or army versus al-Qaeda. In other areas war games reflect the bitter sectarian divides

-- one side gets to be Shiite militiamen, the other Sunni insurgents.The only psychological study carried out in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 was on children by the Association of Psychologists of Iraq (API) in 2006.

It found that the violence was profoundly affecting them."The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the U.S. occupation," said API spokesman Marwan Abdullah when he released the report.

Palestinian tale of kindness plays in West Bank

For the first time, a documentary about a Palestinian boy whose tragic death saved the lives of five Israeli children

– thanks to his father – has been screened in the West Bank.

The documentary -- "The Heart of Jenin"

– tells the story of 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad al-Khatib, who was shot dead by Israeli troops when they mistook his toy gun for a real weapon.The shooting happened in the West Bank town of Jenin on Nov. 2, 2005.

At the time, Israeli soldiers had orders to "shoot anything that moved," one soldier said in the documentary.

The shot to Ahmad's head proved fatal, killing the boy from Jenin refugee camp. Ahmad's father Ismael al-Khatib later decided to donate his boy's organs to patients at the Haifa hospital where his son was pronounced dead."If I can't help my son to recover, then may be I can help other kids," he says in the documentary.

Five Israeli children received Ahmad's life-saving organs. The feature length documentary – directed by Marcus Vetter and Lior Geller –was screened at the German-French Cultural Center in Ramallah on March 27, the first time the film was shown in the Palestinian territories for a general audience.Palestinian cinemas refused the film because Geller is Israeli, said Farid Maajari, director of the cultural center.

Storyline

The Heart of Jenin follows Ahmad's father Ismael on his journey through Israel, visiting the children who found life through his son's death.Ahmad's kidneys went to the daughter of a Jewish settler in Occupied Jerusalem and a Bedouin boy from the Negev Desert region. His heart went to a Druze family in northern Israel. Two other beneficiaries chose not to participate in the documentary.

The extraordinary donation was approved not only by the boy's grief-stricken mother and father, but religious and political scholars too.

In the movie, Jenin's mufti approves organ donations. The opinion is backed by the Jenin commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

"We have no problem with Jews as Jews.

There's no problem as long as this will save lives," says Zakaria Zubeidi.In the movie, the father of the Jewish girl said he did not want to meet the donor family and would have preferred if they were Jewish.

He said Arabs only want to kill Israelis, apparently oblivious to the actions of Ahmad's father who donated his son's kidney to save the settler girl.After the screening in Ramallah, German director Vetter told the audience the film was banned from the Tel Aviv film festival allegedly for technical reasons.

"Some people said the film is biased towards the Palestinians because it tackles the death of the child and focuses on checkpoints, collective punishment, and the destruction of Jenin refugee camp," Vetter said.

Ismail al-Khatib now runs a music school for children in Jenin.

"Without peace, only killing will remain. Children from Palestine and Israel and all the world will die," Khatib said.

Aid groups deem Somalia too risky

A number of leading international aid agencies have announced that they consider it too dangerous for their staff to work in Somalia.

The statement was made on Wednesday by 39 organisations, including Oxfam, World Vision and Save the Children.

It came as seven people were killed in a battle on in Jowhar between fighters associated with the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and Ethiopian troops supporting the interim Somali government.

Mukhtar Robbow, a spokesman for the fighters, said his group had briefly seized the town.
Over the past year, Mogadishu, the capital, and other key cities have been hit by almost daily violence. Hundreds of civilians have died and tens of thousands forced to flee their homes.

The aid agency statement said: "The crisis engulfing Somalia has deteriorated dramatically while access to people in need continues to decrease; 360,000 people have been newly displaced and an additional half a million people are reliant on humanitarian assistance."

The statement is based on a report released last October.

"There are now more than one million internally displaced people in Somalia. Intense conflict in Mogadishu continues to force an average of 20,000 people from their homes each month."

Last week, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, presented the Security Council with a report proposing the deployment of 27,000 peacekeepers to replace the stretched African Union force.

The Security Council has reviewed options for increased UN involvement in Somalia, but certain members have ruled out an early deployment of a full peacekeeping force.

The aid agencies said families left in the capital are among "the poorest of the poor who did not have the means to flee".

"Record high food prices, hyper-inflation and drought in large parts of the country is leaving communities struggling to survive," they said.

Iraq's corporate genocide

Five years ago, I understood very little about the Iraq war. When asked to write an anti-war speech, I didn't even know where to begin. Today, I know why it happened, and I cannot say this is a war like any other, or even that it is a just war.
This war has been too long, too painful, too costly, too evil, too inhumane and too unjust to simply be deemed an invasion, or even worse, a liberation. Today, right here, right now, I want this war to be recognised for what it truly is - a genocide against the Iraqi people.
It is a corporate hate crime. It is not a "just" war.

It does not have a "just" cause. It lacks legitimate authority, it was executed with all the wrong intentions, it was certainly not a last resort, the probability of success was slim and most of all the weaponry has gone beyond "smart bombs".
If the international community recognises the conflicts in Bosnia, Armenia and Rwanda as genocides where human rights are replaced with the extermination of ethnic groups, then Iraq deserves the same recognition - and more.

Rape, indiscriminate killings and torture are all elements of genocide, but the situation in Iraq goes beyond that, fitting the description of something that is more 21st-century - a corporate genocide.
In stating that Iraq's genocide is distinct, the point is not to reduce the relevance of previous genocides or leave similar slaughters in other regions unacknowledged.
Rather, it is to recognise that while the perception of genocide in Iraq is not new, the extent to which it is now a valid belief is.
Corporate genocide is the mass cooperation of a business-led military invasion, where a population is sacrificed for the economic profit of the invader. A corporate genocide goes beyond blind hate and killing innocent civilians to gain power and territory.
In pursuing its economic strategies, the US has caused the death and injury, deliberate or not, of millions of Iraqis.

Foreign businesses that profit and thrive on war have gained new power in Iraq, but lack accountability. Private security firms have little motivation to promote peace - though it is their job - and to end this genocide.
Terrorising my people puts bread in their mouths and takes it away from the mouths of starving Iraqi children. Our war is their income.
To keep the money flowing, private security firms dehumanise Iraqi resistance and rebel groups by labelling them as terrorists. The international propagation of this portrayal is one element in the structuring of a corporate genocide.
Another is the inability of neither international law nor the international community to hold these firms accountable for their actions, including their killings of innocent people.
Individuals perceived to be a threat to the firm are treated as such and can be disposed of under the false guise of an attack, leaving the firms unaccountable. And because these firms have power, they can easily deny misusing it and be believed, if they admit to using it at all.
Not taking responsibility for destroying the lives of men, women and children marks a new chapter in the book of corporate genocide.

It is clear that five years later, the US has achieved little in terms of its humanitarian agenda but much of the goals listed in its hidden corporate agenda.
Iraqi natural resources are being distributed and scattered among the most powerful corporations, with very little profit earmarked towards the rebuilding of Iraq.
This is what the corporate genocide is about.
There is much debate about whether Iraq can stand on its own after the departure of the US Army. But it is crucial to keep in mind that the US never held Iraq up as a country and it never helped Iraqis come together as a nation.
I said it five years ago and repeat it now: a Western-style democracy cannot be forced on a nation that does not welcome it.
To not believe that we, the Iraqi people, will establish a form of government that we see fit for our needs, by ourselves, is an insult to the Iraqi solidarity and historical heritage that has always, continues to, and will never cease to exist.
Nofa Khadduri is a student at the University of Toronto in Canada and has been campaigning against the Iraq war since the age of 15.

Egypt university lecturers stage one-day strike

Thousands of Egyptian university lecturers held a nationwide strike on Sunday demanding salary increases and better pensions, the latest in a barrage of social unrest against the government.

"We didn't give any classes today and now we're staging a two-hour demonstration," said Hani al-Husseini, who heads the strike's coordination committee.

Fellow academic Mohamed Fouad Ali told AFP outside Cairo University, that lecturers currently get around 2,000 Egyptian pounds (365 dollars) a month, a figure they want to see doubled.
"If our demands are not met we will be forced to continue strike days, even if that's not what we want, especially during the exam period," said geology lecturer Ezzedine Abdel Hakim, alongside around 60 colleagues.

Hakim said that more than 100,000 lecturers were taking part in the strike at 25 universities around the country. Cairo University alone employs 12,000 lecturers, he said.Despite the strike, official media reported university life as unaffected by the industrial action.

The MENA news agency said that classes at Ain Shams and Helwan universities were continuing as usual, quoting staff as saying that they were happy with an unspecified salary increase promised by Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif.

Students did not express much solidarity for the lecturers."Some of us have traveled very far to be here and they're making us lose a day of classes, it's too much," said Cairo University student Basma Amin.

The country has been hit by a wave of strikes and demonstrations in recent months in the face of rampant inflation and sky-rocketing prices.

After demonstrations of bread in Egypt

If the Egyptian president knows the meaning of hungry ... he will certainlly knows how much the egyptian people suffer .

No clear road , no agreement, no goodwill. No goals , no common interest ..etc
They are lost as sheep ...
I do not know why they want to hold their new summit in Damascus this month ? if you know please tell me ?!