Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Well done you, Mr Brown, sending a post and writing articles bringing people to discuss and realise what is going on.

Eliot says stop the missiles, but I say give them proper SAM defences and help their nation become prosperous with the Gaza gas field off the coast and secure Or don’t the Palestinians deserve to be secure and fed?. Which will stop such slaughters happening again? And if the Israel regime can resist perpetrating murderous attacks from the air against elected members of the Palestinian parliament, killing all around as well, then perhaps the ceasefire can hold forever. But how can that please the racist right wing who call Palestinians insects etc and want them into to the sea. Things they have said would never be tolerated in proper western democracies they are so racist and vile.

Yet what of this claim about Iranian rockets? Maybe or ... maybe not. Trust the IDF? Sure. But Eliot does. He trusts an unnamed former Pentagon official ...ahuh ... in the article he quoted.

Good old Eliot, if an unnamed source tells Spiegel and Fleishman that those Grads are from Iran then heck they must be, so clever, no other alternative, no other country has Grads have they? Or have they? Seems this is one of the most popular ex-Soviet short range rocket system and is just about everywhere, but Iran is blamed automatically of course by the mouthpieces. Any proof? Remember these are the same buffoons that told us “we hit the UN school because the militants were firing from it” … certainly that changed , like the “we never used phosphorus weapons” – “Ok yeah sure we did” later, and the “it wasn’t and Israeli shell that hit the family on the beach” remember that one that Eliot ran all the way with...turns out it was an “errant” shell accidently fired ... “hey I wonder what happens if I push this button ... oops, phew it was just Gaza”.

No credibility from the Israelis, they have lied through the teeth every time.

So what of Eliot’s Iranian Grad’s? No-one else has them do they?

“Few systems in the world’s artillery arsenal can boast such a wide spread as the Grad (Hail) MLRS developed in the USSR in 1963...." and these are all the known countries with such:

Algeria	48
Angola	75
Armenia	50
Azerbaijan	60
Belarus	208
Bulgaria	144
Central African Republic	5
Cyprus	4
Democratic Republic Of Congo	6
Egypt	60
Ethiopia	10
Finland	24
India	80
Iran	64
Kazakhstan	15
Macedonia	12
Mali	2
Mozambique	5
Namibia	4
Nicaragua	30
Nigeria	5
Pakistan	40
Poland	226
Russia	5000
Tanzania	48
Ukraine	600
Yemen	280
Zambia	50

 

So one must wonder at the sourcing of Messrs Peter Spiegel and Jeffrey Fleishman who lead their article with a picture of a "traumatised girl"in Israel of course, from the noise of one. At least she still has her limbs, but no picture of a traumatised Gazan who has just lost all his family, or the bloody bodies of Gazan children...and then these "journalists" quote "a former Pentagon official"" unnamed of course ,saying they come from Iran.....Sure.

If Saddam was still there it would have been Saddam wouldn't it? And don’t you love the "former Pentagon official" – why the SMH gives by-line to such crappy Zionist propaganda I do not know

Journalism used to be proper sourcing and quoting and both sides given equally but that was pure Hasbara BICOM would have been proud of.

We have recently read about BICOM in Britain, and how (delightful) naughty activists raided their offices and stop for a day their Hasbara protecting the massacres.

Perhaps that is what has freed the BBC up a bit more. Something has shut the SMH and ABC down, one would think the attack was finished and no more dead, reading their papers.

No story of the doctor murdered by the IDF as trying to get out casualties from a building nor the UN headquarters hit there.

Or the fact that the UN has described the situation as desperate, no food , no water, fuel for the hospitals about to run out, lack of medicines, and aid ships being turned away by Zionist military and Ambulances being denied safe passage to pick up the wounded children, nor of women and children being mowed down despite obeying the order to come out.

A little girl paralysed and her younger sisters murdered along with her grandma who held the white flag.

All by Israeli murdering soldiers who should all be hung just as the Nazis of previous time were., or just taken out and shot as the camp guards were by the Americans when they arrived.

Full turn of history is due, now to the accountability – yet the brutality and murders continue, huge plumes of phosphorus clouds in daytime-chemical weaponry, illegal, as the news is chilled out of our “managerial sphere.”

These are not the normal people one might meet, to kill children in cold blood means a very dangerous type of person. These are truly animals pretending to be Israelis. I wonder if they have hydrophobia.

Where the Grads came from is interesting but irrelevant to the exact issue of the massacres by the IDF in GAZA right now. Truly a genocide chillingly ignored by our Media and justified by our Rudd and Gillard. No doubt their medals for Israel, like Howard’s four and the forest named after him there, are what they hunger for.

Will they send us off to war like Howard did for Israel again? I see nothing to indicate otherwise yet, if the management order comes.

Ok, I made the mistake of going to the red cross site and being disgusted with the horrors inflicted upon the people of Gaza by the Israelis. Seeing the protests does give hope in this world that some have the courage to care and raise their voice.

What power do people wield to chill our news down such? To keep the photos out, the stories sterilised. To chill our politicians down as they did? To chill the US president down of the podium and take orders from Olmert? Chill out guys,, it's just a genocide, back to the "economic crisis" that Obama has been told to revert to. Hooo ha a stooge already.

Chilling how our "western managers" are so under the thumb.

Back to the beach, and hope all here with the courage to do so, copy Mr Brown and his letters.

Cheers

PS Today Russia picked up the phone to the terrorist's daughter(Israel FM) and told of the concern there about the death toll and carnage, "oh, no civilians targeted". No doubt the terrorist’s son (Rahm Emmanuel) in charge of Obama's offices is using soothing lies too at present to his charge.

What is chilling too is that they still play the" Iran is the source of the problem canard", when the problem is the violent occupation and slow genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Iran is obviously still in the crosshairs, despite the China signing today. I wonder if they will give and inauguration present to farewell Bush with a bang.

All those nations' navies in the Mediterranean just hanging around , yeah, relaxing, jamming, heck just one big party there at present, more Aircraft carriers than in a long long time. One can see how the Axes are reforming rapidly as nations realise there is no such thing as international law and might is right, NATO being one.

Cheers again in these sad times of evil deeds, time for troubled sleep.

B.A. Brown: "... fanatical leftist underground guerilla cells in the early 1970s ..."

Actually, point of order. 

Look up Operation Gladio.

Cheers

Whether it was Gandhi (Hindu fringe extremist), Malcolm Shabbazz (ex-Malcolm X contract-killed allegedly by US-based Nation of Islam extremists), John Lennon (an apparently lone, unguided ex-Beatles fan extremist), one of the many prominent victims of crazed racist cells in USA, victims of fanatical leftist underground guerilla cells in the early 1970s or doctors at an abortion clinic, innocent people die by the hand of fanatics.

It is so often fundamentalist doctrine and the nervous repression surrounding it that leads to "religio-ideological" violence. This is often entrusted to or adopted by disturbed fringe persons demonstrating their apparent adherence to a new-found group or doctrine; one that seems to or actually does provide them with safe haven.

In political terms, wild demonstrations that need arms-length (plausible) deniability are delegated to youth wings. Recall those vociferous anti-Australia rallies in Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur at the behest of Suharto or Mahathir in former times, and in some instances recently. Well, the same happens in many situations.

This week especially, security for the inauguration of US President would require massive and extensive psychological profiling of leaders and fringe members of the USA's great diversity of hate groups. Imagine the task if elections in a future Palestinian state and in Israel saw pro-peace parties assume a popular mandate. The convolutions of extremist ideological 'purity' on both sides of the Green Line are legion. For example, the Ultra-Orthodox 10% of Israel's population typically hold that Zionists are their opponents, though ethnic comrades. They see the nation as an entity or impure construct. Sound familiar?

I was reading an excellent historical or anthropological essay by Menachem Friedman just now.

In it he explains how the Haredi, most visibly clustered in “Mea Shearim, the ultra orthodox quarter or ghetto in the centre of Jerusalem” have many factional evolutions over time have variably strong traditions of confining violence against their many oppnents. Sometimes that restraint falters. Friedman writes [note: all subsequent quotations are from Friedman’s essay]:

“According to the Halakhah, one who endangers the Jewish collective is considered a ‘pursuer’; one may either kill him or turn him over to one of the (non-Jewish) authorities. ...Following 1993 the term ‘rodef’ was increasingly used by religious political opponents of the Oslo process to de-legitimate those in the Government who supported and promoted the Peace process- most notably Prime Minister Yitzhack Rabin, who was assassinated in Nov 1995. The operative political implication of the concept of ‘din rodef’ (the law regarding the pursuer) was to provide a religious justification for Rabin’s assassination.” (note # 7)

One can discern similarities in such groups with the Taliban or the Iranian theocratic youth brigades- in the way dogma and leadership affect junior and devout scholars. Both have a morality police with official but muted sanction. Both have problems with women and temptation. Sound familiar?

Here is more from the fairly neutral academic study by Friedman:

“In sum, violence is the direct outcome of haredi society’s definition of its situation as being under constant threat by outside forces. At the same time, however, violence in haredi society results from the fact that it is internally divided and lacks a powerful and accepted leadership with the authority to make binding decisions on the fateful questions confronting it. These conditions afford various zealots the latitude needed both to use violence and to obtain the required protection and support among the various autonomous and competing Torah authorities.”

Is that not much like the apparent psychology of the Hamas militants and their Islamic extremist support network?

What about the holy legions from the US who have to be constantly supervised by Israeli security guards at contested sites that are sacred to Islam and crucial to kicking off those outrageous Biblical literalist prophecies so prized by the demented follower of received truths?

My point here is that the core of any struggle, eternal or immediate, against extremist violence nestles amid the mangled psychologies of religio-ideological schools of thought. They can study in scripture colleges, madrassas, yeshiva (yeshivim) or kolel schools; it is the rote holy book, one truth business that can lead to trouble once guidance by respected Elders fragments.

Note the warning bells, from the 2002 study, that resonate from an insightful observation of an increasingly crucial factor blocking the peace process within Israel. The key element is controlling influence and maintaining restraint. These are common themes and goals across the spectrum in the Middle East situation, past and present.

“Given a number of dramatic changes in ‘haredi’ society, such restraints and limits may well break down. Two important factors bear mentioning in this regard. First, because of the socioeconomic crisis in haredi scholar-society, large segments of haredi youth are exposed to the ‘street’. More and more young haredi men (and even women) totally drop out of or remain only formally enrolled in, their educational institutions, thus becoming more exposed to the secular influences of secular society.

Second, the manifestations of religio-ideological violence among Islamic extremists and Christian fundamentalists also provide models for conscious and unconscious emulation, some signs of which are already evident in the relatively large number of haredi youth attracted to the various ‘Kanahist’ movements (extremist political movements related to the Kach movement founded by the late Meir Kahane).

The violence of extremist Jewish settlers on the West Bank provides another model for violent haredi zealotry. But perhaps even more significant is the greater susceptibility to violence of newly religious haredim (ba’alei teshuvah) who have not yet internalized traditional haredi restraints upon zealotry and whose newfound religious enthusiasm often moves them to extremes. Furthermore, some newly religious haredim are former criminals. While the violence of some of these ba’alei teshuvah is a new and ‘foreign branch’, it has nevertheless made serious inroads into haredi society. Indeed, the Tel Aviv brothel arsonist was himself a recent ba’al teshuvah (influenced by another recent ba’al teshuvah).

This violent crime must surely be a warning sign to the haredi leadership. The fact that they have not yet responded is worrisome- as is the fact that Moshe Sheinfeld has no apparent heir."

Friedman here refers to a strict, but deep-thinking Haredi leader with strong views about restraint and holding to nonviolence).

If the Palestinian leadership is required to behave as virtual "pursuers" of the anti-Peace Accord militants among their own people, what then will the secular/modern-orthodox Israeli majority do to wind in all their ideological extremities? Are they more advanced in this regard than Ataturk? Can we outsiders hope or even expect a degree of secular Constitutional reform in the coming nation State/s of the Middle East?

So, it's Eliot and Alan vs Justin and Paul, with Marilyn's references helping the main arguments advanced in the article.

Angela Ryan is being worse than impolite by using that Polish martyr fellow's quote in such a way. It could have been Primo Levy, or Walter Benjamin, but it was an activist unknown to most outsiders from the history of WW2 resistance:

"*S. Zygielbojm committed suicide early on the morning of May 12, 1943."

That said, is anyone nervous about the prospect of tunnels, and bunker-busting (at 15 metres below ground) becoming the focus of the official line in this PR and actual war?

"Bunker-busters" has that gaming ring to it so beloved of weapons marketers.

But is it not true that the chase in the mountain peaks of Afghanistan has opened the way for the current administration in the US (another week yet to wreak indirect havoc) to develop and maybe market nuclear 'bunker-busters'?

I forget just now the kind of buzz name such devices have or would have: limited fallout..., containable.., micro-nuke..., mini-nuke..., etc until we get too soft, or eventually

"Peace and Security Underground device".

Are not Phosphorus weapons akin to napalm? OK, when fallout from those terrors from the sky hit flesh, are they not akin to napalm?

Eliot quotes an article from the LA Times, reprinted in the SMH. If the article's reportage is accurate, then maybe this section at the end of the article could have been quoted. Well, here it is:

"When the Israelis were in total occupation of Gaza they admitted they couldn't stop the smuggling," said Karim Haggag, a spokesman for the Egyptian embassy in Washington. "It's much more difficult to do in the context of a war zone."

Egypt has agreed to spend $US23 million ($32.6 million) of its annual US military aid on advanced detection equipment, including sensors and remote-controlled robots. Egyptian officials said it had drastically reduced the amount of smuggling, and that Israel had acknowledged the fact.

Israel's own experience shows the difficulty in shutting down the tunnels on the Gaza side. Operation Rainbow in 2004 drew widespread condemnation when armoured bulldozers demolished hundreds of homes suspected of concealing tunnels. Dozens of Palestinian protesters were killed during the raids.

Given Egypt will be a key player in future peace accords and security treaties, I think it best not to defame them by implying they are deliberately allowing the alleged Iranian weapons in, bundled alongside supplies of a civilian nature. I mean, peace between a democratic Israel and a new (largely secular) State of Palestine (around approximate '67 borders) is what we all want, isn't it?

Or are the two variations on how much land and how much access each side has, and will have, more important than the current opportunity for widespread support of a peace plan?

Worse still, are some passionate commentators so frustrated by or hateful of either side they prefer the militants keep at it? Several commentators have expressed dismay that militants are serving their opponents’ ends. Quite so. The logic of war.

According to today's news from Gaza:

"Ma’an - In a statement sent Tuesday morning the Al-Mujahideen Brigades, affiliated with Fatah, announced that they launched two projectiles at the Be’eri area south west of Gaza City Monday night."

So, er, Fatah affiliated are also firing rockets at Israel? Gee, but I thought Fatah were against Hamas and it is Hamas only fighting and shooting rockets blah blah blah. Has there been a bit of a unification of the Palestinians while under attack? Gee, a tactic so often used domestically, make a threat to unify. Did Israel think anything else would happen?

But they are doing Abbas a favour! Aren't they? Here Abbas, take the poisoned chalice, power at the barrel of the Israeli tanks, welcome indeed for you .Don't cancel the "blackwater" protection . People don’t usually like Vichy governments.

Abbas has run out of Presidential time, and has not been re-elected .His mandate finished, two days ago. There was a report of a Zionist think tank assessing that Abbas would not win the next election. May be another reason for attempting to remove the more politically popular Hamas, not so tainted with corruption and (?) Shin Bet complicity as Abbas' Henchmen, it appears.

Significantly, before this attack ,there was quite a bit of back and forth about whether there would be elections etc and the power grab wish by Abbas, the incarceration of nearly a thousand Hamas on the West Bank, elected government remember, by Fatah forces trained in Jordan by the US with Israeli agreement. Hmmm. Perhaps Hamas has to go because it fails to kowtow to foreign powers and blocks Abbas the stooge. It may have worked without the three week massacre of Gaza ghetto. Now who will get the gas contract off Gaza? Egypt did so want a piece. And Jordan now has control of the holy sites in Jerusalem. Nice pay.

One might almost think there was a conspiracy of right wing Zionists, mightn't one? Throw in the duplicitous Arab regimes. Lucky the only conspiracies acceptable to our minds are that cave-dwelling Saudis .Perish the thought. It is just a coincidence that the "Israel a Clean Break Paper "has been so accurate about international events. Lucky for the PNAC writers sitting high up in powerful Neocon Bush regime positions that such things are only a coincidence or there would be a valid treason case now. People will do anything for medals and Forest namings.

I agree with Alan that the Palestinians do not need bunker busting bombs, those are for an attacking or invading nation and the Palestinians have never done that, have they? Every nation deserves the ability to DEFEND, but not to attack.

What they need are a few batteries of S-300PMU2 to DEFEND against rogue nations who DO attack their neighbours savagely, fail to obey ICJ rulings about removing Apartheid Walls and UN resolutions. (Is it the regime or is it the people in full knowledge? I suspect the former with powerful Hasbara, just like Goebbels and the Germans.)I hear these toys are soon to be made in China so will be available in the Go-Lo equivalent weapons shopping malls soon. Africa is full of such.

I am surprised at Israel using illegal armaments like White phosphorus. Even more so at the disclosure that they lied about its use in the Lebanon attack:

Based on his observations last week, HRW military analyst Mark Garlasco determined that the IDF is using the material, although the army has not confirmed its use.

In 2006 Israel acknowledged for the first time that it had attacked Hezbollah targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. Until then Israel had maintained that it only used such bombs to mark targets or territory.

What this means is they have form for illegal weapon use and lying about it. The use of such in Gaza has already been photographed well, even appearing front page in Xinhua. In daylight too, so much for visibility enhancer etc. over urban land. Quite disgusting of the Israelis, and deserving of international condemnation.

That is what is interesting, the power of the Israeli lobby to silence protests by international leaders. If this was Syria responding to Israel's unprovoked bombing (last year) and Tel Aviv had a thousand dead and three thousand maimed, over a third women and children, with illegal weapons methinks the response would be cacophonic. Are Jewish/Israeli deaths more important than Arab deaths?

The world allows some peoples to be rounded up, walled in, starved and then murdered. That was what happened to the Jews of Europe .That is what is happening to the Palestinians. There is no point learning Holocaust studies if we fail to act when it happens before our eyes. We should not allow a small evil group to turn Israelis into the new Nazi killing machine.

We do indeed, all of us, need to study the European Jewish Holocaust, and the Palestinians’ Holocaust as well, to see many many regimes who write their own Mein Kampfs and want Lebensraum at the expense of "subhumans" and who will, if the world is foolish enough to back them and fail to hold to account, put it into practice.

I leave you with this disturbing echo from history (with my reminder of current day):

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry [Palestinians], whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto [Gaza ghetto] fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish [Palestinian] people....

Today, consider the mass graves at Gaza.

Cheers

The sympathy spreads. Even the US MSM is getting in on the act:

This from that commie rag The Wall Street Journal.

This from that ultra commie rag The New York Times.

This is a little map and name of places that were once Arab towns and villages.

And this little quote that makes sense of the above map and name places:

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal Al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

Moshe Dayan; this statement, made in an address by Dayan to students at the Technion in Haifa was reported in Haaretz on 4 April 1969.

And this and this regarding worldwide protests etc.

The sympathy spreads.

Israel has lost.

Eliot, Israel got 360 F16's from the US not to mention 250 pound bunker busters, phosphorous bombs and so on.

Why should the Palestinians sit in their cage and take the bombings and abuse landed on their heads by Israel for 60 years?

Haaretz Magazine, 8 October 2004 – Dov Weisglass, counsel to Ariel Sharon in an interview with Ari Shavit:

Shavit: I still don't see how the disengagement plan helps here. What was the major importance of the plan from your point of view?

Weisglass: The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

…

Shavit: So you have carried out the maneuver of the century? And all of it with authority and permission?

Weisglass: When you say 'maneuver,' it doesn't sound nice. It sounds like you said one thing and something else came out. But that's the whole point. After all, what have I been shouting for the past year? That I found a device, in cooperation with the management of the world, to ensure that there will be no stopwatch here. That there will be no timetable to implement the settlers' nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?"

But this is Israel’s "withdrawal from Gaza":

17.  Following the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council at the beginning of 2006, political, economic and social conditions deteriorated sharply across the occupied Palestinian territories, but particularly in Gaza. This situation has been described elsewhere in detail, particularly in the reports of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 (see A/HRC/4/17). Suffice it to say here that ordinary Palestinians are the main victims of this crisis. According to the World Bank, poverty (based on household income) has risen to almost 67 per cent of the population, with about 80 per cent relying on some form of United Nations humanitarian assistance.

18.  Over the same period, increased military activity added a climate of fear for an already fragile population. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, from the disengagement until 9 November 2006, the Israeli military fired approximately 15,000 artillery shells and conducted more than 550 air strikes into the Gaza Strip. Israeli military attacks killed approximately 525 Gazans and injured 1,527. According to Israel, the majority of its military operations in Gaza are aimed at stopping rocket-launching activity. Over the same period, at least 1,700 Kassam rockets were fired into Israel by Palestinian militants, injuring 41 Israelis.

Next, Barak Ravid reported in Haaretz on Sunday this statement about the recent "revenge" attack by Israel and the zionist diaspora in Australia all jump to the defence of this monstrosity by blaming Hamas:

"Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

…

The plan of action that was implemented in Operation Cast Lead remained only a blueprint until a month ago, when tensions soared after the IDF carried out an incursion into Gaza during the ceasefire to take out a tunnel which the army said was intended to facilitate an attack by Palestinian militants on IDF troops.

Richard: Marilyn, we're having trouble working ot the starts and stops of excerpts. Could you do us a favour and indent them please? It's too darn hot for indenting!

B. Brown, thanks for the effort. Nicely fleshes out, if that's not too egregious a pun, the nub of the atrocity.

Dr.Gary Sauer-Thompson at his blog Public Opinion prefaced his thread "Humanitarian relief Israeli style" (11/1), with the following observations:

The Palestinian death toll has climbed towards 850. Israel shelled a school that had been turned into a refugee centre near Gaza City [cites the Israeli broadsheet Haaretz], killing 42 people who had fled the fighting. The International Red Cross broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to their dead mothers. The Israeli army prevented recuers from reaching the survivors for four days.

It has been sickening watching this stuff on TV news services. The only thing more sickening has been the deafening silence of Western "democratic" leaders, although the lies told about the Palestinans as sole provocateurs by much media commentary is a good match, as B Brown's descriptions amply demonstrate.

Just before the closure of the historic Khyber Pass last month after a series of attacks on NATO's supply lines, Kevin Rudd dropped into Oruzgan to express sympathy for our young men and women having to spend Christmas in such a "godforsaken part of the world", which he also described as a hellhole. Those who have spent any time in that part of the world will know that Afghanistan is not at all godforsaken. The majority of Afghans practise Islam peacefully, most pray to God five times a day and have historically lived by the moderate Hanafi and mystical Sufi doctrines.

How arrogant of us, given our hedonistic society riddled with depression, alcoholism and failed relationships, to describe Afghanistan as a godforsaken hellhole.

The Afghans, more than anyone, believe they have God on their side. Perhaps that's why they're winning the war.

An interesting piece in the OZ today by Benjamin Gilmour.

The problem with the war on terror currently raging in the Middle East is that all sides believe they have God on their side.

Kevin Rudd is asking Australian troops to fight and kill in a country which he describes as a "godforsaken hellhole".

Until all nations pull back their troops to their respective UN recognised borders and stop trying to change people by increasing acts of violence we will all be living in a godforsaken hellhole.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has demanded that Israel and Hamas immediately stop the fighting in the Gaza Strip, saying "too many people have died."

"The fighting must stop ... To both sides, I say: just stop now. Too many people have died," Mr Ban said in his first press conference of the year, a day before he was due to leave on a week-long Middle East tour to press for a Gaza truce.

Ban Ki-moon has demanded an immediate stop to the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Neither Israel nor Hamas are not going to win by force. They should withdraw to UN agreed borders. Israel should remove all blockades and Hamas should stop firing rockets into Israel. If either side fails to comply the UN should impose sanctions. It is time Israel was penalised for the indiscriminate use of military power on a civilian population. 

If the UN stands for peace now is the time for it to act.