The L.A. Simon Wiesenthal Center held a pro-Israel rally on Thursday, July 13th, ( http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=242023 ) to show solidarity with Israeli military attacks against the Palestinian people and the nation of Lebanon. At the 5 p.m. rally attended by around 1,200 supporters of Israel, Wiesenthal Center officials welcomed none other than Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who made it perfectly clear that he SUPPORTS the military actions now being carried out by the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. Speaking of the Lebanese Hezbollah guerillas who've fired missiles at Israel, Villaraigosa said, "What can you say about those who fire missiles at innocent civilians... at children." Yes, what words can possibly be used to strongly condemn the targeting and slaughter of innocent civilians! But perhaps Mayor Villaraigosa should look closely at the pictures on this page, it might then occur to him that Arab civilians, women and children, are also bleeding and dying - and their lives are just as precious.

Medics help a woman who was injured in an Israeli aircraft attack that destroyed a house in Tyre, Lebanon, July 16, 2006. Israeli aircraft destroyed a house in a south Lebanon village on Sunday, killing eight civilians, including five with dual Canadian and Lebanese citizenship, a health ministry official said. REUTERS/Elie Abou Faysal (LEBANON)

Medics help an old woman who was injured in an Israeli aircraft attack that destroyed her house in Tyre, Lebanon, July 16, 2006. REUTERS/Haidar Hawila (LEBANON)

Lebanese men carry an injured boy out of a building in Tyre, after it was attacked by an Israeli warplane on Sunday, July 16, 2006. Israeli airstrikes reduced entire apartment buildings to rubble and knocked out electricity in swaths of the Lebanese capital Sunday. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

Two-year-old Karim Qobeisi is treated in hospital in the southern market town of Nabatiyeh in Lebanon Sunday, July 16, 2006 after he was injured during an Israeli airstrike whilst in his house, according to his father who was also injured. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

The fact is, is that before all these recent escalations, the terror state of Israel continued to murder children (Palestinian ones) and the assault on Gaza was simply turned up a few notches after the IDF was snatched.

Looks as if some people have been drinking from Bush's Kool-Aid pitcher, once again.
Before shooting your right-wing, zionist ass off, might I suggest investing some time in studying history. Ifamericansknew.org is a good place to start. They lay out the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in simple layman's terms, you know, for all the ignorant, brainwashed folk like yourself!
If Israel is so right, just, & holy, tell me why they continue to bomb innocent people & children? Tell me why, if Israel claims to be targeting only Hezbollah, it bombs the airport, bridges, & main road out in Lebanon---all ways out for the innocent non-Hezbollah citizens, forcing them to stay & be killed?
You have alot to learn about oppressed people of the world.
I hope the God you are so willing to kill children for has mercy on your ignorant ass!

If you want to oppose the policies of Israel, the US military base to protext US oil profits in the Middle East, you have to vote for either the socialist Peace & Freedom Party or the Green Party. EVERY SINGLE Democratic and Republican Party politican at all levels supports Israel, including that so-called liberal Rep. Barbara Lee of Berkeley-Oakland who voted for the resolution praising the Butcher of Palestine, Ariel Sharon. If you vote for these people, you vote for war and fascism, the policies of US imperialism and its puppet, Israel. It does not matter what ancestry, color, gender or sexual orientation the Demo-Republican is; the politics are just as rotten. We who refuse to vote for the Democrat-Republicans hope that this latest example will actually teach every reader of this website who wants peace to never vote for any Democrat-Republican again. Running against Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein are Marsha Feinland of the Peace & Freedom Party and Todd Chretien of the Green Party. ONLY P&F and Green candidates are VIABLE; not the warmongering pro-Israel Democrat-Republicans. Now you must realize that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GOOD will come from this Mayor Villaraigosa precisely because he is a Democrat. For more on the Peace & Freedom Party candidates, see http://www.peaceandfreedom2006.org/

Becky Johnson said, "I'm a Green and I support Israel!"- but her green is simply the color of money. Yes, she's like a million bucks... green and wrinkled!

What else would lead this phony Green Party member to make such an asinine remark as, “Not all Greens are anti-semites who find any excuse, real or fabricated, to condemn Israel!!” To condemn Israel’s killing of innocent civilians is NOT to be anti-Jewish. To draw attention to the FACT that Israel’s willful destruction of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon… roads, electric power grids, ports, over 60 bridges, its international airport, etc., constitutes a WAR CRIME is NOT to engage in anti-Semitism. Thousands of Jews within Israel have been protesting against these very policies.

No progressive thinking or humanitarian individual supports the crimes being committed against the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population by the clique of militarists headquartered in Tel Aviv… which is NOT to say that the other side has license or justification for its terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Clearly, Israel has “regime change” in mind for Lebanon - and the wider geo-political plan for the region as drawn up by the Axis of Washington, London and Tel Aviv, is to re-map the entire region to fit the neo-Con vision… and that means a lot of dead civilians.

( An AP Photo by Hussein Malla, shows Lebanese citizens gathering around a civilian killed by Israeli shrapnel from an explosion in Kfarshima, near Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, July 17, 2006. )

It would be impossible to have values that the Green party stands for, yet support Israel's U.S. funded human rights violations, supported by the neocnservative war pigs dominating this country right now.

Why Zionism Is Racism

Zionism is a racist and irredeemable movement, like Bolshevism, Nazism, and Apartheid.

By Rabee' Sahyoun
Posted: 11 Rabi-u-Thani 1422, 3 July 2001

(Note: This article is a direct response, using the same format, on a line by line basis, to an editorial that appeared in the Montreal Gazette on April 26, 2001, written by Gil Troy, a Professor of History at McGill University.)

On this, the 53rd anniversary of the Nakbe' (the Catastrophe of the Palestinian people), it is all too tempting for friend and foe alike to define Israel, and zionism, solely by the Americans' proclamations of its enlightened democracy. To do so is to miss the normal atrocities that occur in Israel daily, the millions who are under curfew and blockade, starving and brutalized, in the Middle East's only colonized state. To do so is to feign the reality of zionism, a racist and irredeemable movement, that survived the twentieth centuries' other genocidal and seemingly passing revolutions such as Bolshevism, Nazism, and Apartheid.

A century ago, zionism extended Western colonialism to Palestine.

The sad truth is that over a century after its founding, zionism seems to be grander and more honorable than its reality. Arabs have suffered from Zionism's belligerence and exclusivity, and many have blamed the United States, and the West, for this because of their unshakeable support of zionism. Israeli aggression over the past seven months has finally renewed international recognition that zionism is racism.

On this anniversary of the Nabke', it is now up to all Jews to follow in the footsteps of the brave few, and denounce the racist and separatist nature of zionism, while the world should encourage them to do so. The world should not allow the torchbearers of zionism to silence and quell the idealism of these few. No nationalism is pure, no movement is perfect, no state is ideal, but today, Zionism persists as a menace, a militaristic and dictatory movement to me and to most Palestinians. A century ago, zionism extended Western colonialism to Palestine; today, as in the rest of the world, colonialism must be ideologically purged from Palestine.

I believe that zionism is racism, because 53 years after being exiled from their homeland, in defiance of the four Geneva Conventions, UN Resolutions 181, 194, 242, 338, and others, and other multilateral and international human rights conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the disinherited refugees of Palestine, continue to endure merciless punishment from the Zionist entity, most recently in the bulldozing of makeshift homes in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza.

I believe that zionism is racism, because I am a Palestinian, and without recognizing the colonialist component in zionism, I cannot explain its racist character, a western movement uprooting the native peoples of Palestine, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Samaritan alike, a people bound to their land, through centuries of raising orange groves, and herding sheep, lending grace to the Hills of God, historically, religiously and culturally.

I believe that zionism is racism, because it fails to appreciate or acknowledge the Palestinians' ties to their homeland, their love for their historical capital, Jerusalem, and the 53-yar plight they have endured as refugees worldwide, in Europe, in North America, in camps Dheishe, Shatila, Wehdaat and others, never giving up hope or struggle in yearning to return home.

I believe that zionism is racism, because it fails to admit the reality that the minority indigenous Jewish community in Palestine, that lived there for the last two thousand years, was an undistinguishable people from its Christian and Muslim Palestinian brethren, and that the leader of the Jewish community of the Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem, Rabbi Lamram Blau, stood on the side of his Palestinian brothers and sisters being exiled in 1948.

I believe that zionism is racism because in modern times, the promise of liberal democracy and justice is a double-edged sword, preached by the Western powers, yet only paid lip-service to in the case of Israel, where Palestinian are continuously expelled, ethnically cleansed, and subjugated, and in the cases where they are assimilated, they are granted, limited, if any, civil rights.

I believe that zionism is racism, because in establishing the racially exclusive state of Israel, in 1948, and expelling the indigenous Palestinians from the land, the zionists severed a relationship that people had to the land for over 4,000 years, uninterrupted, since before Abraham.

I believe that zionism is racism, because in building Israel, the zionists were revising history, embracing the notion of racial superiority, an ideology that has empowered them to discriminate, with all of its associated social ills, injustices, and moral bankruptcy.

I believe that zionism is racism because it fails to distinguish between the nationalism of the American, based on multi-cultural harmony, and the racial exclusivity, separatism, ethnic cleansing, and brutality of zionism, that stands in clear violation of the most basic elements of international law and human rights practices, as most recently highlighted by reports issued by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

I believe that zionism is racism because in our world of post-modern identities, I know that we do not have to be "either-ors", we can be "ands and buts" – a zionist and a settler, an American citizen of Polish heritage but a soldier in the Israeli army.

I believe that zionism is racism because it self-propagates itself as a democratic movement. However, a democracy, cannot, by definition, only be representative of one community in a bi-national and tri-religious contiguous geographic area. A democracy cannot exist for one people and not for another. This as called Apartheid in South Africa, and is now called zionism in Palestine.

I believe that zionism is racism, because it espouses an independent and sovereign Jewish state, in a land where there is no Jewish majority. It espouses that such a sovereign state be at peace and harmony with its neighbors without allowing the Palestinian refugees dwelling within their borders, who were expelled from their homes in Palestine by zionist militias, as is clearly documented by numerous sources including the memoirs of David-Ben Gurion himself, to return to their homes, which is a basic human right guaranteed by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I believe that zionism is racism because it is presented by its champions, from Gil Troy to Elie Wiesel, as a romantic movement, which allowed zionists to reclaim the desert and build a model nation-state. This is racism at its most acute, since there was no desert in Palestine, other than the Negev in the South. This is simply a myth that has been propagated by racists who have supported Israel for the last 53 years, and economic data on agricultural exports to Europe from Palestine dating to medieval times easily rejects and exposes this as a blasphemous claim.

Yes, it sounds far-fetched today. But as Vladamir Jabotinsky, father of revisionist zionism said in a racist boast in 1923, "There can be no discussion of a voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs… Any native people…view their country as their national home… They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner… Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible… colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy."

And thus, Gil Troy and zionists abound are exposed as nothing more than unabashed racists.

[Mr. Rabee' Sahyoun is a economic development policy researcher, human rights activist, and columnist residing in Beirut, Lebanon. He is affiliated with the global grassroots Palestine Right To Return Coalition.]

welve-year-old Nour lay heavily bandaged and fighting for her life in a hospital in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. She is one of many children killed and injured in Israeli air strikes on this Mediterranean port in past days.

"We are praying for her," said Fatima, a laboratory technician doubling as a nurse at Jabal Amal hospital, which is now overloaded with the victims of the air strikes.

Ali, the doctor treating Nour, said he did not know whether she would survive her injuries. "She has large burns all over her body she is losing a lot of fluids. She probably won't live; her life is now in God's hands."

More ambulances streamed into the hospital and doctors hurried to treat the victims of the latest bombing. Whatever the Israelis' intended target, the bomb fell on a small water canal next to the Qasmia refugee camp, home to about 500 Palestinians. Its victims were 11 children taking an afternoon swim in the canal.

...are starkly contradicted by Israel's treatment of occupied PALESTINIAN lands and communities. These are:

ECOLOGICAL WISDOM
The combined activities of settlers and the IDF have deliberately hastened occupied Palestine's environmental decline, especially if you look at water resources and Palestinian efforts to sustain agriculture

NON-VIOLENCE
Pretty transparent this one

SOCIAL JUSTICE
and this one

COMMUNITY BASED ECONOMICS
when you're talking PALESTINIAN communities, these are demolished much like environmental assets, and for the same reason: to destroy Palestine's economic viability overall

RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY
nuff said

...what is it that mystifies you about the following wording:

"Five out of your seven items ... are starkly contradicted by ***ISRAEL'S*** treatment of occupied Palestinian lands and communities."

Hmmmmmmmmmm

?????????????????

Yeah, I know: divert, distract, deny, deflect...

Lets start by talking about the Palestinian devastation of the water table, causing saline infilration. Or shall we talk about the corruption overwhelming anything like reasonable zoning? Or social justice, particularly for the un-politically connectedpoor, Gays or Women?

TW's ignorance is vast

The part Israel and the Jewish residents have played as you laid out in the "ecological wisdom" clause is minor in the grand scheme of things.This is the only part in which you have any sort of valid point at all. Your case is weak. As usual you're impelled to make up for your shortcomings with foul language.

...what is it that mystifies you about the following wording:

"Five out of your seven items ... are starkly contradicted by ***ISRAEL'S*** treatment of occupied Palestinian lands and communities."

Hmmmmmmmmmm

?????????????????

Yeah, I know: divert, distract, deny, deflect...

Wanna come along to the picnic? You'll have to be on TW's team. Feel free to bring the micro-galil, though remember that we are sorta the non-violent type. Oh, and SJ, you should come along too. Desolation Wilderness, August 12-14.

but, Meg, then the boys will outnumber the girls. No fair.
And if its survivalist, I think we shouldn't allow firearms. It should be survival of the fittest, not survival of the best armed.

First of all, our boisterous lesbianism will trump all. But you're right about the firearms. But since the men outnumber the women, they should probably have a handicap.

but Meg, any team with TW is already handicapped. Anyway, i didn't realize you were also a boisterous lesbian.

Oh sorry, no not really, that's you and Becky, right? I can't quite keep track of these things these days. I'm sure TW knows.

I don't think we actually invited Becky, yet.

Allright, here's the invite list:
Boys: TW, Yid, Lunchbox, Gehrig, Sheepdog (are you still around), and SJ (oh yeah, and Toady, as lunch)
Girls: Tia, Becky, and CM

This is sad. Not enough girls. TW, Lunchbox, would your wives come? Would they like to play on my team? We'll let you watch.

There are four primary directions in the LA Political Compass. The Westside, the Eastside, the Valley to the North, and the Southside. Villaraigosa is an Eastsider. His other supporters are on the Westside. The North... its Riordan country so Antonio got a free ride there, though Hertzberg seems to do well up there too. The South isn't Antonio's ground, despite the Spanish surnames there. It's still Bradley territory, and still the most solidly progressive area in Los Angeles.