In the 1940s, the British forces in Palestine made it easy for Zionist gangs to occupy Palestine. This resulted in the establishment of the racist Israeli state which evicted thousands of Palestinians from their land and turned them into refugees.
History is repeating itself. Iraq is in danger of the same thing happening there.
What we wonder is whether the coalition forces which invaded Iraq for no reason have opened the door to Jewish immigration into Iraq. Are they attempting to create a Jewish state in northern Iraq which is an area rich in natural resources? Is this the fulfillment of the Zionist dream to create a Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates? This all comes on the heels of the Israeli decision to force the remaining Palestinians off their land so as never to establish a Palestinian state and to defy all peace initiatives.
Those follow what is happening in Iraq will see that Israel has a hand in the country. Mossad, its secret service, has many operation centers both in Baghdad and in other major cities in Iraq; their job is to organize terrorist activities to guarantee that Iraq remains unstable. Mossad officials also supervise the torture of Iraqi prisoners since they gained so much experience torturing their Palestinian prisoners.
This information comes not from Arab sources but from American ones backed up by documents. An Israeli presence in Iraq is unjustified. Israel worked hard to escalate problems between Iraq and America. The main target was not to get rid of Saddam. The coalition forces could have finished Saddam off if they had wanted to after the war to liberate Kuwait. They did not, however, choosing to keep Saddam in power and use him as an excuse to stay in the region. The principal reason for the latest invasion of Iraq was to destroy the army and divide the country into a number of small states. This tragic situation is a veritable invitation to Israel to come in and use it to achieve their own dreams.
Because invading Iraq was primarily beneficial to Israel, the Jewish state played an important role by maintaining a presence in the decision-making institutions of the West, particularly the United States, until the invasion. Seymour Hersh in an article in The New York Times on 21 June wrote: There is a heavy Israeli presence in Kurdistan which aims to build a strong regional Kurdish military able to balance the growing Iranian influence in Iraq and also to balance the Sunni Baath militia in the country. The Kurds will also be used to carry out operations in Syria and Iran in order to destabilize the situation further. This is all part of preparations to establish an independent Kurdish state including all the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
Once this has happened, the way for Israeli control of Iraq will be clear; the Israelis will be ready to make war and call it the "Second Liberation War"--with the first being the war they waged as they took over Palestinian land. Israeli penetration in Iraq should raise a warning of the tragedy of Palestine being repeated; this would be unacceptable for all. It is a threat to international peace and raises the level of danger considerably. Israel itself is the real threat to international peace.
Hassan Tahsin
ARABNEWS.COM

It is a sad and unfortunate part of the human nature, that when oppressed by others, we appeal to humanity and justice, and fight against the oppression, as we should. Once we get the upper hand we turn around and inflict similar atrocities on others. All ethnic groups, religions and societies have been guilty of this evil.
In these ever-repeating tragedies, the innocents are the victims. Yet by their quiescence, when it happens to others, they are guilty of being enablers. Often the lament is what could an individual do? It is usually true, but not always. As the history is witness, not many but a few times, an average individual has made a difference.
It is important to speak out against all atrocities, even when one can not make a difference materially. It is more difficult, therefore more important to speak out against atrocities committed by one's own kind.
Recently the Asian Center for human rights reported, the land grab and killing of indigenous "Jumma" people in south-eastern Bangladesh (Chitagong Hills). The attacks are aimed at terrorizing indigenous people for their lands. In April 2003, the army and illegal settlers burnt down Jumma houses in Bhuiochari village after indigenous peoples asked the settlers to stop encroaching onto their lands, and to dismantle the houses they had built. The army encircled the village and forced the indigenous people out of their homes while the settlers looted and burnt down the houses".
Recall that Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan in 1971 because of the inequities and the maltreatment from the more powerful Western Pakistanis. Similar atrocities are committed by the Janjaveed (Nomadic Sudanese, claiming Arab decent) on the darker settled Muslims of Darfur region.
Muslims vocally, monetarily and emotionally decry and condemn, as they should, the atrocities and land grab against Muslims in Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Ughur, Kashmir, Gujarat and many other places. Such land grab, ethnic cleansing and genocide are occasionally even gingerly condemned by the supposedly Islamic governments, though not too vocally lest their own record may be examined more closely.
Yet, when Muslims oppress people of other religions or even other Muslims in the same manner the criticism at most is muted. For example the persecution of Muslims and non-Muslims by the erstwhile Talibans in Afghanistan, Kurds by Arab regimes, Jumma people in Bangladesh, Qadianis in Pakistan or tribal cleansing in Darfur region of Sudan and Acheh in Indonesia.
To their credit many Muslim journalists have taken pains to write about it with passion.
Often governments justify their actions or inaction by pointing to the follies and deviance of the people being oppressed. These are more self-serving than real. Even when true, the duty of the government is to treat all its citizens with equality and justice. The miscreants should be brought to the court of law. Governments that suppress civil descent and practice oppression in effect invite rebellion.
Unfortunately it is true that some in the western media with an anti-Islamic agenda would take the Muslim condemnation of other Muslims for their own purposes. It should not deter us, because it has been going on for a long time. Our timidity and non-condemnation only helps the evil forces within our communities. Paucity of reform and negation of such heinous forces from inside the community bring condemnation and pressure from outside. It only helps to advance the agenda of those outside forces that are malicious towards Islam for their own vile reasons. It is always better if the opposition springs from within the community.
Mirza A. Beg
YELLOWTIMES.ORG

Displaced Sudanese women pray in a makeshift mosque in Abu Shouk camp in the northern Darfur region of Sudan in this Sept. 3 file photo. (Reuters Photo)

Imagine that genocide were taking place--thousands of children dying, women raped, men mowed down in groups--just as the American political parties held their quadrennial conventions. Surely it would be a major subject of conversation and alarm as the nation's political elite debated their agendas for the coming four years.
No? No. Of course not. We all know that genocide is taking place, in the Darfur region of western Sudan, and you did not hear it discussed during eight nights of rousing oratory at two conventions.
Well, but be fair, you say; party conventions are hardly the place or time to talk about such depressing matters. Behind the scenes, the foreign policy mandarins of each party, the masters of "never again" rhetoric, must have been consumed by the issue. Right?
No again. In Boston and New York, the Council on Foreign Relations, the nonprofit membership organization of the foreign policy elite, held panel discussions on the central issues of the next four years. Ambassadors and Cabinet ministers mingled with professors and pundits. They congratulated each other on how foreign policy has moved, after many years on the periphery, to the heart of this presidential campaign. They discussed Iraq, terrorism, trade deficits, China, Korea, the Voice of America, European public opinion, port security. . .but not Darfur. A million people may die, tens of thousands already have, and--nothing.
How can this be? One explanation would be that Americans (and Europeans, who were decently represented in the audiences of both panel discussions) just don't care all that much. The victims of Darfur are poor, black and far away. The issues are hard to understand. U.S. and European security is not at stake.
This was more or less George W. Bush's attitude when he was running for president in 2000 and said the Clinton administration had been right not to intervene to stop the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which some 800,000 people died. "That's an important continent," he said of Africa, "but there's got to be priorities. ...We can't be all things to all people in the world."
A more charitable explanation would be that people care but that stopping genocide is not easy. Villages are being destroyed across an area the size of Texas. Sudan's air force and its proxy gangster militia can induce starvation simply by poisoning wells or covering them with sand. Sudan's government opposes and frustrates outside intervention. U.N. Security Council members such as China oppose anything that affronts Sudan's sovereignty.
But Darfur should be debated precisely because it raises difficult questions--and because those questions aren't so different from the challenges that were posed by Iraq and Kosovo. When is it legitimate to infringe on a nation's sovereignty to ensure global security or rescue an imperiled population? Who should perform those jobs? What if the United Nations says no?
France and Germany opposed President Bush's war in Iraq in part because the international community was not unified. Now U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is clear: An international rescue force is required. But still they hesitate. Why?
WASHINGTONPOST.
COM

A Bangladeshi vendor walks past an unturned manhole cover through a flooded street in Dhaka. (AFP File Photo)

Water is a way of life in Bangladesh. The tales I grew up with in Calcutta across the Indian border are woven into legend and lyric about the 250 rivers, whose turbulence caused such recent havoc. Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate, whose songs are the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, dedicated many odes to those willful waterways.
But it's of my aunt, my father's elder brother's widow whom I called Jethima, Senior Mother, that the floods reminded me. Fat and ungainly, Jethima waddled like a duck. She was also as much at home in the water, swift and unconsciously graceful, as a duck.
When road, pond and courtyard were just a sheet of water in which a silver puja vessel was bobbing away, she floated out without even bothering to hitch up her sari and brought it back. She swam backstroke, but nobody had ever taught her. The village of her childhood could be reached only by poled boat.
Jethima was a raconteur, and told me stories about river dacoits, extravagant living in the houseboats of the rural gentry, and of British government steamers. Our home banked on the Titash river, which inspired fiction and film, but the most impressive vision from childhood visits is the shimmering Brahmaputra, one bank invisible from the other. Only the distant scimitar of a sail pierced the horizon.
Hoping to recapture that magic, I once persuaded the Pakistani authorities to let me travel by steamer from Calcutta to Assam through the twists and turns of those waters.
Many bridges now cross the rivers and motorboats speed villagers from hamlet to hamlet. Labour in Singapore, especially, has brought prosperity to the countryside, and sturdy brick houses are replacing the old huts of mud and thatch.
The real pain is that the waters that feed the Bangladeshi soul and sustain the Bangladeshi body with food and fish, should kill nearly a thousand people, affect millions, destroy crops and ravage the land. The life-giver has turned killer because of the nationalistic compartments that disrupt the natural unity that has re-emerged in strategic jargon as globalisation.
But since rain, storm and cyclone know no borders, more than 30 million people are also suffering in neighbouring Indian states and the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal. The other Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and Tibet, too, are involved because some errant rivers rise in their mountains, where melting snows compound rampant deforestation.
Rescue from the cruel cycle of flood and famine demands five-nation cooperation. Only the United Nations' guiding hand can persuade Bangladesh, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan to devise ways of saving trees, conserving the soil, storing rain and snow water, preserve ground water and control grazing.
But water being Bangladesh's lifeline, some waterlogging will always be an attendant, perhaps even inevitable, accompaniment of luxuriant paddies. Millions of people live on shifting sandbanks and strips of soil that break away from some bank and drift and settle elsewhere. There are moves to evacuate them but the soil is rich and the land bitterly fought over.
Jethima told me of a dispute that went through all the Indian courts to the Privy Council in London. When it was decided, the loser magnanimously invited the winner to dinner on his launch. They sailed into midriver, and that was the last that was seen of the guest. It was said in hushed whispers that the river had won.
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
STRAITSTIMES.ASIA1.COM.SG

Although the specific reference to Syria was deleted from the original text of last week's UN Security Council resolution so that the US-French draft resolution could win the minimum nine votes for formal adoption, the resolution targeted Damascus and no other country. The council called on all foreign armies still deployed on Lebanese territory to withdraw in keeping with various international conventions and certainly previous UN Security Council resolutions. But the resolution in question should have been more balanced and equitable. It would have been so had it called for an end to all occupations in any part of the Middle East, especially in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. By singling out Syria, the resolution is discriminatory. And its shortcomings do not end there.
The rule of thumb in international law suggests that a sovereign state where foreign armies are deployed for one reason or another must itself demand the withdrawal of foreign armies. In the case of Lebanon, the recognised and legitimate government of the country has not made such a demand of the Syrian armed forces. In the same vein, the part of the resolution that called for the disbanding of paramilitary forces operating in Lebanon is also desirable, but it is the prerogative of the government of Lebanon to take such an initiative. The same cannot be said though with reference to the resolution's call for free elections in Lebanon. The international organisation in general and the UN Security Council in particular have a solemn duty and obligation to promote democracy in any part of the world.
The council's demand that free and fair elections be conducted in Lebanon is a legitimate request that no country can quarrel with. Promoting democracy is not a matter of interference in the internal affairs of states by any stretch of the imagination. It is well-established in international human rights that the UN may indeed insist that countries hold free and fair elections. But as the UN Security Council has adopted the resolution as is, Lebanon has no other choice but to honour it in its entirety.
JORDANTIMES.COM