Stephen Lendman

Caged queue - a Palestinian's lifeline to work (SMH)

On April 23, Arizona's racist immigration bill became law. Called "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act," it requires proof of legal entry or citizenship or face arrest, fines, jailing, and/or deportation.

Under South African apartheid, pass laws segregated blacks from whites, restricted their movements, required pass books be carried at all times, and produced on demand or face arrest and prosecution. Evolving from the 18th and 19th century until their 1986 repeal, they restricted entry to cities, forcibly relocated blacks, denied them most public amenities and many forms of employment, and became apartheid's most hated symbol.

Under Israeli military occupation, repression is worse than South Africa's. It's a sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination, strangulation, and genocide, incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid as well as repressive dispossession, displacement and state terrorism to separate Palestinians from their land and heritage, deny them their rightful civil and human rights, and gradually remove or eliminate them altogether.

Apartheid is the worst form of racism. Israeli militarized occupation is the worst form of apartheid, incorporating violence, military incursions, land theft, home demolitions, targeted assassinations, murder, mass arrests, torture, destruction of agricultural land, and isolation - measures amounting to genocide, including starving Gazans under siege.

The ID/permit system is one of many elements designed to make greater Israel an ethnically pure Jewish state.

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Tim King

Tim King, Executive News Editor of the US website Salem-News.com, vows to continue highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people and the brutality of their Israeli oppressors, following a relentless attack and false accusations of “anti-Semitism” by a pro-Israel bigot.

"False accusations of anti-Semitism are easily dismissed by those who know us; for those who don't, the only thing we're guilty of is honest reporting on a very hard topic." ~ Tim King

People who are dialled into the news know that Israel struck the people of Gaza during the winter of 2008-09 in an unprecedented military attack called "Operation Cast Lead" that killed more than 1,400 people, primarily civilians, including over 340 children.

Salem-News.com has been under attack in recent days in every imaginable public setting because we tell the truth about Israel's military tactics and oppression of the Palestinians.

The person attacking us claims that photos shown of Palestinian children killed in Gaza are "forged", even though there are more published online than anyone could count.

We have said it a thousand times and I will say again now, that we engage this subject for the sake of humanity. We do not believe that any group has the right to subjugate, imprison or eliminate another group of people. We are accused of something that is utterly false; we are accused of being anti-Semitic, when the only thing we do is report from the perspective of the oppressed, unarmed, poverty stricken, hungry and tired people of Gaza. We care because these people are under fire.

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Kelley B. Vlahos

"The Best Years of Our Lives"

There is a scene in the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives when Homer Parrish, played by real World War II veteran Harold Russell, shows his girl what it is like to dress himself for bed with the rudimentary metal hooks that have replaced his left and right hands in the war.

“I want you to come upstairs and see what happens,” he says, daring Wilma to bear witness to his shame, and what could be her own tragic burden if she chooses to stay with him. The girl next door comes through this test with such grace and understanding that the audience breathes a collective sigh of relief – Homer, the former All-American high school athlete, now with two hooks for hands and meager prospects, will have this angel for a wife. All is good in the world.

I have always had mixed feelings about this film, which was directed lovingly by William Wyler, a director of renown who also survived World War II as a major in the U.S. Army Air Forces. There is a maturity and realism, albeit soft and sometimes fleeting, about this character study, which explores the repercussions of quickie pre-deployment marriages, divorce, depression, alcoholism, unemployment, disability, and ordinary civilian readjustment. Fred Derry, played by a straight-on Dana Andrews as the former Air Force “glamour boy,” finds himself at one point in the aircraft graveyard with a flashback coming on. He is headed for those graves, a dusty, banged-up hull of a man – until someone, another vet, gives him a job, and he gets a second chance at living the American dream circa 1946.

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Juan Cole

Pakistani authorities doing the hard police work in Karachi of attempting to trace the network of friends and contacts of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad have come up empty-handed. There is nothing in Shahzad’s background that links him to the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP or Taliban Movement of Pakistan), based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Pakistani police found one person in Shahzad’s circle, a relative of his wife’s, who in turn had ties to a fundamentalist group. Muhammad Rehan is a “not very active” member of the radical organization, Jaish-i Muhammadi. He and Shahzad traveled last year to the Pashtun northwest, though this trip is unremarkable because their family is Pashtuns and they are from that region. Rumors that Rehan had been arrested or that he had long lived near the radical mosque turn out not to be true, according to the Pakistani periodical, “The Nation”.

Pakistani police are unable to find any link between Rehan and the Pakistani Taliban, and can’t even find evidence of active membership in the Jaish-i Muhammad. Nor is there evidence that he introduced Shahzad to the Pakistani Taliban. Shahzad is apparently a braggart (ego inflation and delusions of grandeur are typical of terrorists) and his claim that he received training in a Taliban camp is not believable given that he had not the slightest idea how to construct a simple truck bomb. If there is one thing the Pakistani Taliban are good at, as guest op-ed contributor Stephan Salisbury noted here on Monday, it is blowing up things. In fact, the results of the intensive Pakistani investigation vindicate Salisbury’s skepticism about claims made by civilian US officials concerning this case. Informed Pakistani writer Rahim Yusufzai exhibits the same skepticism.

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