Prominent Calls for Diplomacy with Iran
(source: Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation)
Monday, June 9, 2008

Only liberal peaceniks support direct diplomacy with Iran, right? Wrong. This collection of
quotes highlights prominent calls by military officials, elected officials, and international
civil society for diplomacy with Iran.

U.S. MILITARY OFFICIALS

"Iran is not a suicide nation...I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear
weapon. I believe that we have the power to deter Iran, should it become nuclear. War, in the
state-to-state sense, in that part of the region would be devastating for everybody, and we
should avoid it -- in my mind -- to every extent that we can."
Retired Army General John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command, Associated Press
(September 17, 2007)

There is an astonishing amount of ignorance about the basic facts of the so-called Arab-Israeli
conflict.This video was shot in the late 1940s to educate the public about the plight of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had been made homeless as a result of the violence
and intimidation that accompanied the founding of the state of Israel.

What most Palestinians thought would be a temporary dislocation lasting only a few weeks at
most became permanent. Homeless with just the clothes on their backs, they were left in the
desert without food, water, and medical care to die.

As Israel celebrates its 60th birthday,
let’s take a look at what kind of a country
Israel really is.This is an old black and white film, made
before the Israeli War Party succeeded in
subverting US politics and news media.

When you hear the phrase “Palestinian
refugee camps”, this is what it meant
in the years after hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians were illegally evicted
from their lands by “newly born” Israel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ6lIsl-pHU

Lawmaker takes 9/11 doubts global

By JOHN SPIRI - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - Special to The Japan Times

In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony
Blair's environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling
the global war on terrorism "bogus." Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S.
government either allowed 9/11 to happen, or played some role in the destruction wrought that
day. Besides Meacher, few politicians have publicly questioned America's official 9/11
narrative — until Diet member Yukihisa Fujita.

In January 2008 Fujita, a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, asked the Japanese
Parliament and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to explain gaping holes in the official 9/11 story
that various groups — including those who call themselves the "911 Truth Movement" — claim to
have exposed.

Fujita, along with a growing number of individuals — including European and American
politicians — are leading a charge to conduct a thorough, independent investigation of what
happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Three or four years ago I saw some Internet videos like 'Loose Change' and '911 In Plane Site'
and I began to ask questions," Fujita said in an interview, "but I still couldn't believe this
was done by anyone but al-Qaida.

Israel’s own version of Holocaust denial
By Bradley Burston

13/06/2008

Imagine, if you will, a Jewish state founded as a refuge and last resort, that one day declares
the act of seeking refuge a felony.Imagine, if you can, a law that would allow the expulsion,
without any judicial process, of refugees so desperate to reach that state, that they would
hazard their very lives and those of their children to do so. Imagine, impossible as it may be,
that a Jewish state that is home to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors, could decide
not only to imprison African refugees for five years, but to make those fleeing genocide in
Sudan subject to prison sentences of at least seven years.

Such are the outlines of a bill that has already sailed through a preliminary Knesset vote. So
callous is the language of the bill, so cruel its provisions toward Africans now fleeing a host
of dangers, that the Prevention of Infiltration Act of 2008 may be said to constitute a whole
new form of Holocaust denial. It is a denial grounded in the belief of many Israeli Jews that
we are so well versed in the lessons of the Holocaust - and so often ingenuously compared to
the Nazis - that we are incapable of treating others the way the wartime world acted toward its
doomed Jews.

For decades, Israeli leaders, frightened of opening a Pandora’s box holding millions of
Palestinian refugees, ducked and deferred policymaking on the larger issues of non-Jewish
refugee asylum. They allowed...

Israeli Government: "Immoral, Unethical And Illegal"

By Eileen Fleming

15 June, 2008

On June 5, 2008, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate from Northern Ireland, Maried Corrigan-Maguire a
keynote speaker at the third annual Bil'in conference on nonviolence traveled to Hebron. Maried
had been invited by friends who volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Team's based there.

Maried wrote:

On arrival in Hebron we met with the Administrator of the Hebron Orphanages. He explained that
the Israeli army is threatening to close 14 schools and orphanages in the Hebron district.

Eight of these schools and orphanages belong to the Islamic Charitable Society, while the
remaining six belong to the Muslim Youth Society.(On 26th February the Israeli army forces
handed over military orders of closures and confiscations of two bakeries, administrative
buildings, a warehouse, three schools and two orphanages. All of these owned by the ICS.)

He took us to see a newly built school owned by ICS , (cost of one million) which was due to be
opened in August, but is now closed. The Israeli Military has welded the gates of the school
closed and the...