Salem-News.com Lebanon articles Page 18

Christmas Resistance Activities in Palestine: The Best Christmas Ever

I urge all to come visit us and see what is happening in the "little town of Bethlehem": 170,000 people nearly half refugees, crowd into 13% of the original district of Bethlehem surrounded by 27 ft high walls and electrified fences.

(BETHLEHEM) - I have spent 26 Christmases in our homeland but never had a more meaningful one than this one.

In the traditional 12 days of the holiday season, we finished with class work at Bethlehem University.

IF Obama Could Put America`s Own Real Interests First...

Obama (possibly at the risk of assassination) could create a whole new Middle East, one in which justice for the Palestinians and peace and security for all could flourish.

(LONDON) - The headline is not meant to imply that I think he will. As things are he can’t because of the stranglehold on American policy for Israel/Palestine of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress, the mainstream media and many institutions of state including the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

My purpose is only to offer an answer to this question: What could happen if President Obama was able to put America’s own real interests first?

Australia Rejects Israeli Ordered Media Censorship on Al-Manar

In issuing its findings of fact and conclusions of law ACMA found that Al Manar did not violate Australian law, and was free to broadcast in the country.

(BEIRUT) - Australia’s Parliament and main stream media may not differ all that much from other western countries when it comes to chronic groveling to its Zionist lobby.

But like citizens in many countries, Australians sometimes courageously exhibit admirable independence and respect for their society’s own values.

Zionist Lobby`s New Orders for Obama

AIPAC drafted House resolution 1734 and Berman rushed it through, fearing Obama could declare there will be no further American veto on Security Council resolutions

(LONDON) - After his appointment as Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, California’s representative Howard Berman told The Forward, “Even before I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist.”

This is the man, one of the Zionist lobby’s most influential stooges in Congress, who introduced House Resolution 1734 which gives President Obama his new orders.

Civil rights for Palestinian refugees

During the spring-summer 1948 Nakba, 780,000 Palestinians were driven from their ancestral lands.

(BEIRUT) - The European Union can redeem its charter and alleviate widespread suffering in Lebanon’s refugee camps.

The Palestine Civil Rights Campaign—Lebanon (PCRC) was organized in Washington DC and Beirut, Lebanon in late 2009 with the goal of achieving, in concert with Lebanese based NGOs, the enactment in Lebanon’s parliament of two basic civil rights for more than 400,000 UNRWA registered Palestinians.

Obama`s Last Card - Will he Play It?

"...The EU position on settlements is clear - they are illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace.”

(LONDON) - President Obama ought to have trouble sleeping at night knowing that by allowing Israel to continue its illegal settlement activity on the occupied West Bank he has made himself, and his country, openly complicit in the Zionist state’s defiance of international law. In a different America that ought to be enough to have any president removed from office.

My main point comes down to this. Now that he doesn’t have to honour any of the promises Secretary of State Clinton is said to have made to Prime Minister Netanyahu in a desperate (and predictably doomed) effort to persuade him to deliver a 90-day settlement freeze, Obama does have one last card that he could play.

Book Review: Coffee with Hezbollah

The satire is harsh, and nobody escapes the treatment, including the author.

(WASHINGTON D.C.) - Here’s a strange and sparkly, jumpy and tightly-packed little book by PULSE’s own Belen Fernandez, in which our heroines (Belen and the photographer Amelia Opalinska) hitch-hike through Lebanon and Syria a few weeks after the war of summer 2006, consuming far more caffeine than is good for them.

Beyond Gonzo, it doesn’t pretend to journalism at all. Instead it recounts a fairly lunatic, fairly random sight-seeing tour towards ‘the dark force’ Hezbollah.

State Department`s Wikipocrisy
So Who Exactly is Sowing Strife in Lebanon?

(BEIRUT) - Forty years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

The UN Declaration provides in part:
...“ armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic and cultural elements, are in violation of international law”.

Israel Loves Lebanon

My latest philosophy is that continued Israeli lovemaking in Lebanon is not compatible with the term “withdrawal”.

(WASHINGTON D.C.) - Last month on a farm outside a small Texas town, I encountered an Israeli in his twenties who overheard me say that I had been to Lebanon and who mischievously remarked that he had also “been, but not been”.

I asked him what year his non-trip had occurred and and if it had perhaps been military in nature. A year or two after the Israeli withdrawal, he said–he could not remember–and yes.

Bellemare`s STL `Procedural` Problems: Indict, Quit and Blame the System!

Will Bellemare indict and quit and let the “system” deal with the aftermath?

(BEIRUT, Lebanon Al-Manar) - It is unlikely that Special Tribunal for Lebanon Prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare ever met U.S. Senator Wayne Lyman Morse, one of three Senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that authorized the US bombing of North Vietnam.

One can’t help thinking that Bellemare could use Morse’s counsel on the subject of what some are calling the Rafiq Hariri murder,“ a Trial of the Century” while some international lawyers fear it could be a “Trial for a Century.”