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a whores chorus .....

a whores chorus .....

Cheney pledges support for Israel ...

Mr Cheney also plans to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank as part of efforts to reignite the peace process.... 

American Vice President Dick Cheney has given strong backing to Israel during a nine-day tour of the Middle East. 

Speaking at a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, Mr Cheney said the US would always support Israel in its quest for safety. 

"The United States will never pressure Israel to take steps that threaten its security," he said. 

"As successful democracies, the US and Israel have a basic confidence in the power of freedom to lift up whole societies and to lay the foundation for peace. 

Cheney Pledges Support For Israel

Annapolis flat tyre...

US makes new Mid-East peace bid
By Jon Brain
BBC News, Jerusalem

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has begun a visit to Israel seeking to add fresh impetus to peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Despite four months of negotiations since the Annapolis summit, there is still little sign of tangible progress.

Ms Rice's visit comes when talks between the Israelis and Palestinians appear to have lost all momentum.

She is expected to urge both sides to do more to fulfil their commitments to the peace plan known as the road map.

She will be holding meetings in Jerusalem and the Jordanian capital Amman, just three weeks after her last visit.

The Palestinians accuse Israel of flouting the road map by continuing to build settlements in the West Bank and by failing to relax the restrictions on ease of movement for Palestinians there.

honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East

No Peace Without Hamas

By Mahmoud al-Zahar
Thursday, April 17, 2008; A23

GAZA -- President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.

Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal -- from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.

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see toon at top... 

verboten bread...

Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army

In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron

The Israeli public was given an unflattering glimpse of military life in Hebron this year when a young lieutenant in the Kfir Brigade called Yaakov Gigi was given a 15-month jail sentence for taking five soldiers with him to hijack a Palestinian taxi, conduct what the Israeli media called a "rampage" in which one of the soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian civilian who just happened to be in the wrong place, and then tried to lie his way out of it.

In a confessional interview with the Israeli Channel Two investigative programme Uvda, Gigi, who had previously been in many ways a model soldier, talked of "losing the human condition" in Hebron. Asked what he meant, he replied: "To lose the human condition is to become an animal."

The Israeli military did not prosecute the soldier who had fired on the Palestinian, as opposed to Gigi. But the military insists "that the events that occurred within the Kfir Brigade are highly unusual".

But as the 22-year-old soldier, also in the Kfir Brigade, confirms in his testimony to Breaking the Silence, it seems that the event may not have been exceptional. Certainly, our interview tells us, he was "many times" in groups that commandeered taxis, seated the driver in the back, and told him to direct them to places "where they hate the Jews" in order to "make a balagan" – Hebrew for "big mess".

Then there is the inter- clan Palestinian fight: "We were told to go over there and find out what was happening. Our [platoon] commander was a bit screwed in the head. So anyway, we would locate houses, and he'd tell us: 'OK, anyone you see armed with stones or whatever, I don't care what – shoot.' Everyone would think it's the clan fight..." Did the company commander know? "No one knew. Platoon's private initiative, these actions."

Meanwhile in the same space on earth:

On Eve of Passover, Bread Stirs Deep Thoughts in Israel
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Israel’s public debate shifted this week from Hamas to hametz. But it remained no less heated.

Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance, consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.

The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops.

While most debates about the painstakingly negotiated public role of religion in Israel line up along predictable lines of observant versus secular, this discussion has been different. And it speaks to a palpable anxiety over the need to define and defend the Jewish nature of the state, even as Israel’s 60th anniversary approaches next month.

In opinion articles and informal conversations, some nonreligious Israelis said that they liked the eight-day absence of hametz, and that it was a small but potent symbol of a unique collective identity.

Carter's peace

But he defended his visit on Monday, telling Israel's Council on Foreign Relations: "The problem is not that I met with Hamas in Syria. The problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet with someone who must be involved."

Mr Carter said Hamas had reiterated its position that it would accept an Israeli state within its pre-1967 borders, living in peace with Israel, if such an agreement was approved by Palestinians.

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Gus: former president Carter will be called naive by the reigning greedy mob in the white house. Pre 1967? Holy Dooley, Israelis would never accept this, would they?... As far as Israeli maps are concerned, the Gaza strip and the west bank are fully included in the greater Israel... But Carter is right: better be a naive optimist with dialogue than just be a bloody moron with guns. Here I tar both sides with the same brush.

with moronic guns

He added that this did not mean recognising Israel, but he said: "We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as an alternative to recognition."

The United States said Mr Meshaal's comments did not amount to a change of position by Hamas.

In any case, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "actions speak louder than words".

Many Israelis and their allies do not believe Hamas' offer of a truce, says the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.

They cite the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

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gus: peace will happen in someone's lifetime...  when all are dead.