In recent months, Muslims around the world have watched with consternation as Israel has tightened its economic blockade of Ghazzah, subjecting its people to intense hardship, while Western powers have done next to nothing to stop them, despite the fact that the use of starvation and deprivation as a weapon of war is explicitly forbidden by international law.
In recent years, there has been increasing awareness of the true nature of zionism and the Israeli state in the West. FAHAD ANSARI discusses the reasons for this change, and finds them in the determination of Palestinians to resist their oppression and dispossession.
There is open talk of impending war in Lebanon these days. Lebanese of many factions are speculating about potential scenarios for another war being waged on Hizbullah by Israel. These discussions concentrate on the question of when, rather than whether, such a war will erupt.
The assassination of Imad Mughniyyeh, the Lebanese Hizbullah’s most senior military commander, who died on February 12 in a bombing in Damascus, is probably the most serious blow that Israel has so far managed to deal the Islamic resistance movement.
When Palestinians in Ghazzah broke down the fence dividing the city of Rafah into Egyptian and Ghazzan sections, and crossed into Egypt to obtain vital supplies that they have been starved of by Israel’s blockade of Ghazzah, it was a clear demonstration of both their plight and their determination to survive, despite the hardships and suffering. Perhaps most significant of all was a point noted by many journalists and other observers: that despite their situation in Ghazzah, few Palestinians were trying to remain in Egypt.
When the Bush administration first let it be known that it was planning a major “peace conference” between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas, administration sources told journalists that it would be a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Dayton conference that ended the Bosnian war in 1994.
In recent years, the long story of the Palestinian struggle has been punctuated by meetings, conferences and summits of various kinds between Israeli and Palestinian officials, usually mediated by international leaders or institutions. Yet there was a time, only a few years ago, when it was assumed that everything could be sorted out if only the two sides could be persuaded to sit together and talk. Then, the great object of all the politicking was to persuade the leaders of the two sides to come together and, it was assumed, listen to what each other had to say.
Since Israel is the new temple and zionism the new religion of the West, any mention of eliminating zionism or the zionist regime inPalestine is immediately branded as anti-Semitism and a threat to world peace. This is especially true of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, whose speech on October 26, 2005, has been so widely misquoted that promoting the lies has effectively become official policy in many Western countries. Even the United Nations Security Council was duped into issuing a statement condemning Iran for calling for Israel’s “destruction”.
On 20 March, 2003, the government of the USA sent its full range of armed forces intoIraq, obliterating its infrastructure and smashing its civil life like a lion devouring a rabbit. Since then almost one million men, women and children have been killed, and uncounted others have been wounded. No one wants to say so, but consequently the Iraqi people are teetering on the brink.
The imperialist monster is disrupting its own international order. Even the laws of its own heartland are no longer the rules that are supposed to govern its activities. The United States has been trying to jump-start a worldwide diplomatic initiative that will result in military action against Islamic Iran by ignoring the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and by forcing European and Asian governments to line up with US strategy vis a vis Islamic Iran.
When Hizbullah drove the Israeli military out of southern Lebanon in August last year, winning a stunning victory in a war by which the US and Israel had hoped to destroy Lebanon’s main Islamic movement and secure control over the country, it was a defeat not only for Israel but for the US as well.
The month of August included the anniversaries of three important events in Islamic history, two reflecting Islam’s glory and the third the Muslims’ current impotence.
Asked about the lesson of fasting, Imam Husain (r.a.) is reported to have replied that “the rich should feel the pangs of hunger and appreciate what the poor have to endure, and therefore share Allah’s bounty with them.”As Muslims begin the month of Ramadan later this month, they should think of the suffering of their brothers and sisters in Palestine, and Ghazzah in particular.
The United States regime, never shy about showing its zionist colors, has come out swinging again; this time, its target is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Islamic State in Iran, which it plans to brand as a “terrorist organization”. Of course, the politicians in Washington are free to say whatever they want – thank God it’s a free country, with freedom of speech and all that. The thing to notice, though, is whether such “made in Tel Aviv” statements are serious policy or simply political rhetoric.
One of the things we try to do in this column is to confront false impressions head-on. This month, we address the myth that America is trying to “spread democracy” in the Islamic East, although the use of this argument has been declining in almost perfect proportion to the increasing military failures of the armies of the US and its allies – particularly zionist Israel – wherever they have tried to pursue their interests through war. Listen to the speeches of the highest officials of imperialism in America, and the change of tone is inescapable.
It would be wise to infer that the latest visit of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of Israel, to Washington is meant to fuse zionist and imperialist objectives even further vis a vis Islamic Iran. We can read what the mainstream media, ever the servants of the imperial-zionist nexus, have left out of their reports; i.e., the top echelons of both the political and military establishments in Tel Aviv and Washington are finalising their plans for the only government in the world that is close enough to Israel to defy its expansionist schemes.
The creation of Israel in 1948 is commonly referred to as the nakba: the catastrophe. It is a measure of the disaster of the Arab defeat in June 1967, when al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the Haram al-Sharif were captured that, of all the disasters that the Palestinians have suffered since 1948, that is the one known as the second nakba. This month, the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War will be marked all over the world.
The threat to Muslims from an imperialistic American-Israeli power will not go away even if “Islamic terrorism” ends. The war-elites in Washington and Tel Aviv spent most of the last century sapping the resources of the world in what was supposedly a life-and-death struggle with communism. When communism collapsed, the politicians went looking for a new enemy to justify continuing their aggressive policies. Unable to find any convincing enemies to promote, they set about creating one from the movements of resistance created by their own policies; and so we now have “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamo-fascism”.
Palestine has seldom been out of the news in recent years. In the last few years the separation wall has been built, the second intifada has taken place, Israel has withdrawn from Ghazzah, and also perpetrated further incursions into and land-appropriation in the West Bank. With all this going on, international humanitarian and human-rights laws have been largely thrown out of the window, and the Israelis continue with impunity to disregard laws and treaties to which they are signatories. In Palestine, the issue of political prisoners is an ongoing one.
Was it a coincidence that Israel suddenly started unscheduled demolition work at the Haram al-Sharif in al-Quds, launching protests across occupied Palestine, just as Fatah and Hamas leaders were on the verge of a landmark power-sharing agreement in Makkah? Probably not, for the Makkah Agreement signed on February 8 marks the failure of the US and Israel’s strategy of forcing Hamas to relinquish the mandate to lead the Palestinian people that Hamas won in Palestine’s parliamentary elections in January last year.
