LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

Michael Carmichael
April 26, 2006

Since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, many casual observers of the Middle East have been disturbed by the intensity of his political rhetoric.

In 2005, Ahmadinejad was surprisingly elected over a field of more moderate candidates following years of US bombardment and military occupation of nations bordering Iran: Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many veteran political observers deem Ahmadinejadā€™s electoral surprise to have been a direct result of Bush-Cheney foreign policy which some have said was designed to provoke the election of Islamists to provide a pretense for further military escalations in the region.

Below, you will find some intriguing quotations from Ahmadinejad and others commenting on military and political developments in the Middle East from 1919 to the present.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

“Some 60 years have passed since the end of the second world war. Why should the people of Germany and Palestine pay now for a war in which the current generation was not involved?”

and

“This fake regime (Israel) cannot logically continue to live.”

and

ā€œThere is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe this stigma off of the face of the Islamic world.”

Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres

ā€œSince the United Nations was established in 1945, there has never been a head of state that is a UN member state that publicly called for the elimination of another UN member state . . . there is no place in the world body for such a country.ā€

Ariel Sharon

From an interview with General Ouze Merham in 1956

ā€œI don’t know something called International Principles. I vow that I’ll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one strike I’ve killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian woman is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her - and nobody tells us what we shall do - but we tell others what they shall do.ā€

and, from 2003

ā€œAs soon as Iraq is dealt with, I will push for Iran to be at the top of the ā€˜to doā€™ list.ā€

Winston Churchill

Advocating the use of Chemical weapons on Iraqis in 1919,

ā€œ(I advocate) using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes . . . against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. (I do not understand) the squeamishness about the use of gas . . . We cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilization of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier.ā€

Ehud Barak

While Prime Minister of Israel as reported in The Jerusalem Post, 30 August, 2000,

“The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more meat you give them, the more they want.ā€

Israel Koenig

From ā€˜The Koenig Memorandumā€™,

“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Benjamin Netanyahu

From his a speech at Bar-Ilan University in 1989,

ā€œIsrael should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”

Chairman Heilbrun*

While Chairman of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv in October 1983,

“We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.”

David Ben-Gurion

To his General Staff,

ā€œWe must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Yitzhak Rabin

Statement on Gaza just before signing the Oslo Accords,

ā€œIf only it would sink into the sea”.

Outgoing Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz

Told a Tel Aviv conference,

“Of all the threats we face, Iran is the biggest. The world must not wait. It must do everything necessary on a diplomatic level in order to stop its nuclear activity. Since Hitler we have not faced such a threat.”

Reference

Ahmadinejad needs to learn

*Disputed by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy In Middle East Reporting in America) a strident opponent of Palestinian rights and an outspoken proponent of Fox News reporting standards.

Source: http://planetmove.blogspot.com/

Michael Carmichael
Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is one of America’s most distinguished historians. In his latest essay, he reminds us of the defense policies of America’s greatest presidents. In contrast, we can see that the policies of Bush are not designed to produce security. They are designed to produce fleeting political advantages for his extremist agenda.

The recent clear-out of staff at the White House is motivated by preparations for the autumn bombing campaign against Iran. Rove, Card and McLellan were known to be opposed to the Iran gambit. Now they are gone and replaced by stalwart neoconservative radicals: Bolten and Kaplan who are gung-ho for war against Iran.

Yesterday, President Ahmadinejad reminded the Iranian people that nuclear weapons were “against Islam”. When he was alive, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons because they are “against Islam.” The situation evolving around Iran makes the Iraq war seem justifiable since it was based on faulty intelligence that Saddam had a vast arsenal of WMDs. In the case of Iran, intelligence informs us that they do not have nuclear weapons, merely a nuclear program. The sole rational for the Iranian campaign is, therefore, regime change.

Schlesinger’s insight into American history presents us with the perfect backdrop for the events unfolding today in Bush’s Washington, events that are being driven by greed for power, fear of the ‘other’ and madness.

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Thank you for signing the DontAttackIran.org petition!

With your help we have very quickly collected almost 30,000 signatures and the support of numerous organizations.

We will soon announce an event at the White House. Cindy Sheehan and representatives of all the supporting organizations will deliver the petition to the President, along with every signature and comment you’ve added. You will all be invited to join us!

BUT FIRST… we need to collect a lot more signatures. If you each find one more person, we’ll double our count. If you find two or 10, our numbers will shoot through the roof.

Please print out this flyer and post it, pass it out, put it in the mail, tack it up on bulletin boards:

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/do wnloads/daiflyer.pdf

Please send the following note to everyone you know:

_________

Bush and Cheney are seriously considering attacking Iran, and are threatening to use nuclear bombs. Please join me in helping to prevent this by taking 60 seconds to sign a petition at

http://www.DontAttackIran.org

The US has drawn up plans to level a massive aerial assault against Iran.
By Dr. Jorge E. Hirsch
04/23/06 “ICH”

Thirteen of the nationā€™s most prominent physicists have written a letter to President Bush, calling U.S. plans to reportedly use nuclear weapons against Iran ā€œgravely irresponsibleā€ and warning that such action would have ā€œdisastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world.ā€

The physicists include five Nobel laureates, a recipient of the National Medal of Science and three past presidents of the American Physical Society, the nationā€™s preeminent professional society for physicists. The letter echoes a petition signed by over 1800 physicists and scientists across the US and the world. Join Dr. Jorge E. Hirsch, Professor of Physics, UCSD To deliver the letter to President Bush Wednesday April 26, 5 PM, Lafayette Park, opposite the White House, Washington, DC

Letter to President Bush

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President: Recent articles in the New Yorker and Washington Post report that the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran is being actively considered by Pentagon planners and by the White House. As members of the profession that brought nuclear weapons into existence, we urge you to refrain from such an action that would have grave consequences for America and for the world.

1800 of our fellow physicists have joined in a petition opposing new US nuclear weapons policies that open the door to the use of nuclear weapons in situations such as Iran’s. These policies represent a “radical departure from the past”, in the words of Linton Brooks, National Nuclear Security Administration director. Indeed, since the end of World War II, US policy has considered nuclear weapons “weapons of last resort”, to be used only when the very survival of the nation or of an allied nation was at stake, or at most in cases of extreme military necessity. Instead, the new US nuclear weapons policies have significantly lowered the threshold for the potential use of nuclear weapons, as clearly evidenced by the fact that they are being considered as another tool in the toolbox to destroy underground installations that are “too deep” to be destroyed by conventional weapons. This is a major and dangerous shift in the rationale for nuclear weapons. In the words of the late Joseph Rotblat, Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his efforts to prevent nuclear war, “the danger of this policy can hardly be over-emphasized”. Nuclear weapons are unique among weapons of mass destruction: they unleash the enormous energy stored in the tiny nucleus of an atom, an energy that is a million times larger than that stored in the rest of the atom. The nuclear explosion releases an immense amount of blast energy and thermal and nuclear radiation, with deadly immediate and delayed effects on the human body. Over 100,000 human beings died in the Hiroshima blast, and nuclear weapons in today’s arsenals have a total yield of over 200,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Using or even merely threatening to use a nuclear weapon preemptively against a nonnuclear adversary tells the 182 non-nuclear-weapon countries signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that their adherence to the treaty offers them no protection against a nuclear attack by a nuclear nation. Many are thus likely to abandon the treaty, and the nuclear non-proliferation framework will be damaged even further than it already has, with disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world.

There are no sharp lines between small “tactical” nuclear weapons and large ones, nor between nuclear weapons targeting facilities and those targeting armies or cities. Nuclear weapons have not been used for 60 years. Once the US uses a nuclear weapon again, it will heighten the probability that others will too. In a world with many more nuclear nations and no longer a “taboo” against the use of nuclear weapons, there will be a greatly enhanced risk that regional conflicts could expand into global nuclear war, with the potential to destroy our civilization.

It is gravely irresponsible for the U.S. as the greatest superpower to consider courses of action that could eventually lead to the widespread destruction of life on the planet. We urge you to announce publicly that the U.S. is taking the nuclear option off the table in the case of all nonnuclear adversaries, present or future, and we urge the American people to make their voices heard on this matter.

Sincerely,
Philip Anderson, Michael Fisher, David Gross, Jorge Hirsch, Leo Kadanoff, Joel Lebowitz, Anthony Leggett, Eugen Merzbacher, Douglas Osheroff, Andrew Sessler George Trilling, Frank Wilczek, Edward Witten

By Stephen Zunes, April 21, 2006
Editor: John Gershman, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org

Three years after U.S. forces captured Baghdad, Iraqis are suffering from unprecedented violence and misery. Although Saddam Hussein was indeed one of the world’s most brutal tyrants, the no-fly zones and arms embargo in place for more than a dozen years prior to his ouster had severely weakened his capacity to do violence against his own people. Today, the level of violent deaths is not only far higher than during his final years in power, but the sheer randomness of the violence has left millions of Iraqis in a state of perpetual terror. At least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died, most of them at the hands of U.S. forces but increasingly from terrorist groups and Iraqi government death squads. Thousands more soldiers and police have also been killed. Violent crime, including kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery, is at record levels. There is a proliferation of small arms, and private militias are growing rapidly. A Lebanon-type multifaceted civil war, only on a much wider and deadlier scale, grows more likely with time.

Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by U.S. forces since the invasion, but only 1.5% of them have been convicted of any crime. Currently, U.S. forces hold 15,000 to 18,000 Iraqi prisoners, more than were imprisoned under Saddam Hussein. Amnesty International and other human rights groups have cited U.S. forces with widespread violations of international humanitarian law, including torture and other abuses of prisoners.

It is not just the fear of arrest and torture that have worsened since the U.S. conquest of Iraq three years ago. Although the destruction of the civilian infrastructure during the heavy U.S.-led bombing campaign in 1991 combined with the subsequent economic sanctions led to enormous suffering among ordinary Iraqis, the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food program, despite the abuses, did substantially improve the quality of life in the years preceding the U.S. invasion. Now, deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly among children, are again on the increase. The supply of drinking water, reliability of electricity, and effectiveness of sewage disposal are all worse than before the invasion.

Read the rest of the article here.

From Stopwar, UK

This week, Daniel Pipes, adviser to George Bush and a leading proponent of the Iraq invasion complained about “the ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favour we gave them: to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.” The reasons for that “ingratitude” are given below in the shocking statistics which show that, three years after the US/UK invasion, Iraqis are far worse off now than they were under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime.

There can be no clearer indictment of those who took us into this illegal war  not least our prime minister Tony Blair and the Labour MPs who supported him — nor can there be any clearer vindication of the anti-war movement, which predicted the horrors that continue to be inflicted on the Iraqi people. We always opposed Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and wished for his overthrow as much as anyone, but it was obvious that getting rid of a tyranny was the last motive in the minds of George Bush and Tony Blair, as is shown from US/British support for tyrants around the world, not least in earlier years for Saddam Hussein himself .

LEVEL OF VIOLENT DEATHS
The level of violent deaths is far higher than in the last years of Saddam Hussein’s rule. At least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died, most of them at the hands of U.S. forces but increasingly from terrorist groups and Iraqi government death squads. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police have also been killed.

CRIME AT RECORD LEVELS: Violent crime, including kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery, is at record levels. There is a proliferation of small arms, and private militias are growing rapidly. A Lebanon-type multifaceted civil war, only on a much wider and deadlier scale, grows more likely with time.

MORE IRAQIS IMPRISONED: Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by U.S.
forces since the invasion, but only 1.5% of them have been convicted of any crime. Currently, U.S. forces hold 15,000 to 18,000 Iraqi prisoners, more than were imprisoned under Saddam Hussein.

WIDESPREAD USE OF TORTURE AND OTHER ABUSES: Amnesty International and other human rights groups have cited U.S. forces with widespread violations of international humanitarian law, including torture and other abuses of prisoners.Fear of arrest and torture that have worsened since the U.S.
conquest of Iraq.

INCREASED DEATHS FROM MALNUTRITION AND PREVENTABLE DISEASES: Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly among children, are again on the increase. The supply of drinking water, reliability of electricity, and effectiveness of sewage disposal are all worse than before the invasion.

FIFTY PERCENT UNEMPLOYMENT AND INCOMES CUT BY HALF: As much as half of the labour force is unemployed, and the cost of living has skyrocketed. The median income of Iraqis has declined by more than half. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) reports that the Iraqi people suffer from significant countrywide shortages of rice, sugar, milk, and infant formula, and the WFP documents approximately 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from dangerous deficiencies of protein.

OIL PRODUCTION HALVED, RECONSTRUCTION HALTED: Oil production, the country’s chief source of revenue, is less than half of what it was before the invasion. And despite Bush administration promises to infuse billions of dollars worth of foreign aid to rebuild the country’s civilian infrastructure, only a small fraction of these ventures have been completed, and most projects have been cancelled.

ONE MILLION IRAQIS HAVE LEFT THE COUNTRY: Close to one million Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, have left the country to avoid the violence and hardship brought on as a result of the U.S. invasion.

The above statistics are taken from IRAQ THREE YEARS AFTER “LIBERATION” by Stephen Zunes. A link to the full article can be found on the new STATISTICS page on the Stop the War website:
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/Statistics.htm

Declan Walsh
Monday December 5, 2005
The Guardian

A retired US ambassador has reignited the debate about one of south Asia’s greatest whodunits, the death in 1988 of Pakistan’s president General Zia ul-Haq, by saying that Israel was responsible.

John Gunther Dean, then US ambassador to India, said he suspected Israel’s secret service Mossad of downing Gen Zia’s aircraft in an effort to stop Pakistan developing the nuclear bomb. But when he reported these suspicions to Washington, he was accused of being mentally unbalanced and subsequently forced into retirement. Almost 20 years later, Mr Dean, 80, was speaking out in an attempt to tell his side of the story.

The circumstances of Gen Zia ul-Haq’s death are as contentious as the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy. The military dictator died on August 17 1988, after leaving the town of Bahawalpur, in Punjab province, where he had been watching a trial of American M1 tanks.

Moments after Gen Zia’s C-130 plane took off it wobbled then plunged to the ground, killing all on board including the US ambassador to Pakistan and a US general. Conspiracy theorists have focused on a crate of mangos placed on board moments before take-off. Some believe it was sprayed with VX, a poison gas, which only a few countries had.

Gen Zia had a long list of enemies, all of whom have been blamed for his death over the years. But Israel has received little attention. Mr Dean told the World Policy Journal that it was plausible Mossad had orchestrated an assassination plot, believing Gen Zia’s boast that he was only “a screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb”. But when he told his superiors he was removed from his position in Delhi and his career ended. Mr Dean, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany, said he had no proof of Israeli responsibility. General Muhammad Ali Durrani, a retired Zia-era commander, told the journal the Israeli thesis was “far-fetched” and blamed the crash on the C-130, which he said had a history of faults.

With the Iraq debacle on his resume, the President would struggle to convince Americans that the US should take on Iran, writes Andrew Sullivan

April 17, 2006

THERE is something unreal about the bellicose statements coming from some sources in the Bush administration towards Iran.

On their face, they make a kind of sense. In terms of pure military force, the US probably could do a great deal of damage to Iran’s malevolent attempt to gain nuclear weapons. But so what? The same could have been said about Iraq in 2002.

Yes, the US military did have the capacity to destroy Saddam’s regime. And it did so in three weeks. The salient question was and is: what then? It appears that the Bush administration never seriously asked that question in advance of war in Iraq and never made serious plans for the post-invasion period.

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By Foreign News Desk, Istanbul
Published:
zaman.com
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&trh=20060419&alt=&syf=butun

Warnings about Islamophobia introduced in the documents of the Council of Europe through Turkey’s efforts continue to surface.

The European press headlined the concerns about the rise of hostility towards Islam. Spanish newspaper, El Pais, highlighted the growth of Islamophobia in the country.

Attacks against Muslims have increased since the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004.

The Spanish newspaper cited examples of violence and hate, including setting mosques on fire, threatening imams and mailing the Danish cartoons insulting Prophet Mohammed to the homes of Muslim citizens.

In Britain, The Independent, also dealing with the issue wrote that Islamophobia is on the rise in schools in the UK; people are attacked or spat at because they look as though they may be Muslim. These concerns were expressed at a National Union of Teachers conference in Torquay, the newspaper wrote.

The story read that delegates at the conference warned of the rising tide of Islamaphobia in schools in the wake of last year’s bomb attacks in London and that many Muslims felt the increasing pressure of racial intolerance.

At the conference, it was warned that groups such as the British National Party and the National Front had been exploiting the tensions and spreading a message of racial hatred. It was also emphasized that the government’s war on terror had fuelled this atmosphere of hate.

The issue had come to the agenda at the Conference of European Imams held in Vienna on April 8.

Beate Winkler, the director of the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, speaking at the opening session of the conference had said, “Islamophobia was added to xenophobia in European countries following the cartoon crisis,” and Islamophobic activities were escalating in the aftermath of the protests against the cartoon crisis that turned violent in several Muslim countries.

Islamophobia was also introduced in the final declaration of the Council of Europe leaders’ summit held in Warsaw on May 17, 2005.

In the declaration, Islamophobia was considered equivalent to anti-Semitism. “We condemn all kinds of sexual, verbal, racial and religious discrimination, and intolerance including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. We affirm our determination to set rules and establish an effective mechanism within the Council of Europe to prevent and remove these inequalities.”

Turkey had brought the issue of the gradual increase of Islamophobia in Europe following the 9/11 attacks in the US to the agenda during the summit.

The expression, “struggle against Islamophobia,” appeared for the first time in an official Council of Europe document during the Warsaw summit.

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bushā€™s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iranā€™s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be ā€œwiped off the map.ā€ Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. ā€œThatā€™s the name theyā€™re using. They say, ā€˜Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?ā€™ ā€

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