The Chancellor has criticised Lady Warsi's decision to resign over Britain's "morally indefensible" policy on the conflict in Gaza

The Chancellor has criticised Lady Warsi's decision to resign over Britain's "morally indefensible" policy on the conflict in Gaza

    Tuesday, August 05, 2014   No comments

The Chancellor has criticised Lady Warsi's decision to resign over Britain's "morally indefensible" policy on the conflict in Gaza

 George Osborne has condemned Baroness Warsi’s “disappointing and frankly unnecessary” decision to resign over the situation in Gaza.

Lady Warsi, Britain's first female Muslim Cabinet minister, announced her resignation on Twitter on Tuesday morning, calling Britain’s policy on Gaza “morally indefensible”.

In her resignation letter, she was also highly critical of David Cameron’s recent reshuffle, making reference to the sackings of Ken Clarke, the former minister without portfolio, and Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general.
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Outrage in Saudi Arabia at appearance of female newsreader without headscarf on state television

Outrage in Saudi Arabia at appearance of female newsreader without headscarf on state television

    Tuesday, August 05, 2014   No comments

The unprecedented appearance of a female newsreader on Saudi state television without a headscarf has caused a scandal in the deeply conservative Islamic state.

The unnamed anchor, who has previously worn a hijab in clips circulated online, was reading a bulletin from London for the Al Ekhbariya channel.

Strict Islamic dress codes in Saudi Arabia require women to dress “modestly” – usually with headscarves, veils and full-length abayas.

While women do sometimes appear without head coverings in programmes broadcast by state-controlled channels, newsreaders are never seen without the hijab.

Saleh Al Mughailif, a spokesman for Saudi radio and television, told Al Tawasul news the correspondent was reading the news from the broadcaster's British studio.

"She was not in a studio inside Saudi Arabia and we do not tolerate any transgression of our values and the country’s systems," he added.

He promised that all measures would be taken to ensure there is no repeat of the incident after many viewers expressed outrage.

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Parliament was scene to yet another physical fight on Aug. 4, which apparently erupted due to tension stemming from the government’s policy regarding Iraqi Turkmens

Parliament was scene to yet another physical fight on Aug. 4, which apparently erupted due to tension stemming from the government’s policy regarding Iraqi Turkmens

    Monday, August 04, 2014   No comments

During a General Assembly meeting, lawmakers from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) eventually came to blows, leaving some deputies bleeding.

Following the fight, MHP deputy Sinan Oğan posted Tweets on his personal account, saying it was the AKP deputies who started the fight by attacking him.

The tension erupted after he questioned why the government has not been lending support to Iraqi Turkmens, according to Oğan. Yet, the messages on his account were not less strong than the tension that led to deputies harming each other.

“Sixty AK [AKP] dogs attacked at the general assembly. They were snubbed. They are only able to attack an ‘Ülkücü’ when they are 60 in total,” Oğan said.

“Ülkücü” means “Idealist” and is the name of the political movement that MHP members support.

AKP's Muhittin Aksak, who punched Oğan on his nose during the fight, was pictured in the past while watching boxing games during General Assembly sessions.

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UN chief: Gaza school attack a 'criminal act'; Ban Ki-moon tells Israel to 'end this madness' after bombardment kills at least 10 people and injures dozens

UN chief: Gaza school attack a 'criminal act'; Ban Ki-moon tells Israel to 'end this madness' after bombardment kills at least 10 people and injures dozens

    Monday, August 04, 2014   No comments

A third deadly attack on a United Nations school sheltering people fleeing bombardment in Gaza was strongly condemned by both the UN and the US on Sunday, with UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, calling it a "moral outrage and a criminal act" and pleading for an end to "this madness".

The Israeli defence ministry said on Sunday night that Israel would hold a truce in most of Gaza for seven hours on Monday for humanitarian aid and to allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes, but would fight back if attacked.

The humanitarian truce, beginning at 10am (0700 GMT), would not apply in areas of Rafah, the ministry said, because Israeli forces are remaining on the ground in and around the southern Gaza town to destroy a cross-border tunnel.

The US said it was appalled by the "disgraceful" school attack, which killed at least 10 people and injured dozens just days after the shelling of two other UN schools in Gaza caused international shock and anger.

A hospital near the site of the attack, in the southern town of Rafah, was overwhelmed with the dead and injured. Children's bodies were stored in an ice-cream freezer as the morgue ran out of room.

It was, said Ban, "yet another gross violation of international humanitarian law, which clearly requires protection by both parties of Palestinian civilians, UN staff and UN premises, among other civilian facilities". He called for a swift investigation, saying "those responsible [must be] held accountable. It is a moral outrage and a criminal act."

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had been "repeatedly informed of the location of these sites", Ban added.

In an unusually severe statement, the US state department called on Israel to do "more to meet its own standards and avoid civilian casualties".

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Israel's military censor wanted prior review of the New York Times' article on Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, a missing Israeli officer now believed dead

Israel's military censor wanted prior review of the New York Times' article on Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, a missing Israeli officer now believed dead

    Sunday, August 03, 2014   No comments

In the New York Times' August 1 article, "Gaza Fighting Intensifies as Cease-Fire Falls Apart," the newspaper revealed that it was the first time "in more than six years" Israel wanted prior review.

The Times said it didn't fully comply with the order. Instead of sending "a draft of this article," they just "summarized" the section of its article about Goldin in a phone call. The Times's report reads, as of August 2:

"Israel’s military censor informed The New York Times that material related to the missing officer had to be submitted for review, the first such notification in more than six years. International journalists must agree in writing to the censorship system in order to work in Israel. The Times did not send the censor a draft of this article before publication, but summarized over the phone its biographical references to Lieutenant Goldin."

Interestingly, the Huffington Post noted that the Times didn't include that paragraph about the censor until "nearly six hours" after publication, pointing to News Diffs' record of changes to the article. That may have been because the prior review request came after publication for future reports.

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Brian Eno on the Israel-Gaza crisis: How can you justify images such as this? and Peter Schwartz responds to Brian Eno's open letter on Israel-Gaza crisis

Brian Eno on the Israel-Gaza crisis: How can you justify images such as this? and Peter Schwartz responds to Brian Eno's open letter on Israel-Gaza crisis

    Sunday, August 03, 2014   No comments

Dear All of You,

I sense I’m breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can’t keep quiet any more.

Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shredded (the hospital’s word) by an Israeli missile attack – apparently using their fab new weapon, fléchette bombs. You probably know what those are – hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was four years old.

I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won’t sign up to it.

What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But – for Christ’s sake! – it’s not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don’t get it. I really hate to think it’s just the power of Aipac [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]… for if that’s the case, then your government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don’t think that’s the reason… but I have no idea what it could be. The America I know and like is compassionate, broad-minded, creative, eclectic, tolerant and generous. You, my close American friends, symbolise those things for me. But which America is backing this horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can’t work it out: I know you’re not the only people like you, so how come all those voices aren’t heard or registered? How come it isn’t your spirit that most of the world now thinks of when it hears the word “America”? How bad does it look when the one country which more than any other grounds its identity in notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes and puts its money exactly where its mouth isn’t and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?

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Dear Brian and friends,

I am writing to respond to your note about Gaza and how America is responding. It deserves a response.

My feelings and the actual realities are complex on several levels; the realities of the Arab-Israeli history and conflicts, global politics and modern American history/demographics. All three levels interact to create the current situation. And to understand the US posture you have to consider the history. Let me say, that, as you know, I am an immigrant and child of Holocaust survivors. I am culturally Jewish, but with no religious or spiritual inclinations, an atheist. And I believe that creating the Jewish state of Israel was a historic mistake that is likely to destroy the religion behind it. The actions nation states take to assure their survival are usually in contradiction to any moral values that a religion might espouse. And that contradiction is now very evident in Israel’s behaviour. Israel will destroy Judaism.

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SPIEGEL has learned from reliable sources that Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations

SPIEGEL has learned from reliable sources that Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations

    Sunday, August 03, 2014   No comments

SPIEGEL has learned from reliable sources that Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations. In addition to the Israelis, at least one other intelligence service also listened in as Kerry mediated last year between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states, several intelligence service sources told SPIEGEL. Revelations of the eavesdropping could further damage already tense relations between the US government and Israel.
[...]
Still, there are no doubts about fundamental support for Israel on the part of the United States. On Friday, the US Congress voted to help fund Israel's "Iron Dome" missile defense system to the tune of $225 million (around €168 million).

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More than 1,000 Turks fighting for ISIL, "the Islamic Caliphate"

More than 1,000 Turks fighting for ISIL, "the Islamic Caliphate"

    Saturday, August 02, 2014   No comments

The number of Turkish citizens fighting under the umbrella of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is slightly more than 1,000, according to Turkish officials, who admit that they are unable to learn the exact number. The estimated number of armed ISIL fighters is around 12,000 to 15,000, which shows that Turks make up just less than 10 percent of the jihadist group.

Turkey has long been accused of not efficiently controlling its borders to prevent those foreigners joining the jihadist extremist groups and stop the flow of weapons into Syria. In response to these criticisms, Turkish officials have noted the difficulty of controlling a nearly 900-kilometer-long border while blaming Western countries for not sharing intelligence on potential recruits for the jihadist groups.

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American media's new pro-Israel bias: the same party line at the wrong time Evolving conversations on the ground demand probing questions on-air; So why does TV news look like a Netanyahu ad?

American media's new pro-Israel bias: the same party line at the wrong time Evolving conversations on the ground demand probing questions on-air; So why does TV news look like a Netanyahu ad?

    Friday, August 01, 2014   No comments

Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:

• What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?
• What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?
• What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel?

These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.

But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.

So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked.

Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”.

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White House's strongest and most explicit condemnation of Israel comes as Palestinian leaders prepare for talks on short ceasefire

White House's strongest and most explicit condemnation of Israel comes as Palestinian leaders prepare for talks on short ceasefire

    Thursday, July 31, 2014   No comments

Israel has come under heavy pressure from the US to curtail civilian deaths after concluding that its forces were likely to have been behind the shelling of a UN school.  

  

In what amounted to the strongest and most explicit condemnation of Israel since the Gaza conflict began, President Barack Obama's press secretary on Thursday called the attack "totally unacceptable" and "totally indefensible". He also said the administration was urging Israel to do more to avoid civilian deaths and said US officials were taking issue with "specific military decisions" by Israel. "It is clear that we need our allies in Israel to do more to live up to the high standards they have set themselves."

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