palestine celebrates 60 years of exiled abuse

from afp: Hundreds of Palestinian refugees headed to Lebanon's southern border with Israel on Wednesday marking 60 years since the creation of the Jewish state and exile from what was once Palestine. "We want to return to our country. We desperately miss our country's soil," said Mahmud Mahmud, aged in his 70s, who was wearing a traditional Palestinian headdress. "We came to this area in a peaceful march against the occupation on this occasion."

bush celebrates & says goodbye
from los angeles times: President Bush arrived in Israel today to help celebrate the Jewish State's 60th anniversary and possibly help nudge along the (so far lackluster) Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations he launched last fall. With Bush's time in office winding down, Israeli observers sound genuinely nostalgic to see him go, and some are already fretting about Israel's future with someone else in the White House. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post this week declared: "Of all the US presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush."



related: all the president's nazis (real and imagined): an open letter to bush by larisa alexandrovna

israel’s 60 years of nuclear proliferation
from jerry mazza: I have not written this article to condemn Israel on its 60th anniversary as a quasi-legal state, quasi to question the UN’s legitimacy to create it, and quasi for Israel’s subsequent actions to ingest and destroy the Palestinians. My aim is to point out Israel’s own hypocrisy regarding Iran’s possible possession of nuclear capability not just for peacetime power. Beyond the Cold War, it is Israel that has historically been edging us into a worldwide nuclear conflagration; and doing so since 2001 with the hegemonic boobs presently running the USA and supporting Israel’s misguided efforts with billions of dollars of aid for arms in the hope that it will keep the Arab world intimidated and give us its oil.

brutal US & Sunni alliance 'ugly, but effective'

from raw story: CNN on Thursday showed graphic footage of a pro-US Sunni militiaman beating and threatening to kill a suspected al-Qaeda member and of another al-Qaeda member being executed by a militia group.

"In Anbar Province," President Bush recently boasted, "Sunni tribes that were once fighting alongside al-Qaeda against our coalition are now fighting alongside our coalition against al-Qaeda. We're working to replicate the success in Anbar in other parts of the country."

According to CNN, American commanders say they do not condone the violence and summary executions, but they appear to accept them as an "ugly but effective" aspect of the war. Although "the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad is not happy, wary of US support for armed Sunni groups," this is also unlikely to carry much weight with US commanders.

In a followup pice on Friday, Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware commented on the "unseemly" nature of the strategy, saying, "Does it have some ugly edges? Yeah. And American commanders knew this when they commissioned this project. ... They're putting the fear into al Qaeda, and that's why we're seeing such an enormous change in the attacks in Anbar Province."

"The Shia government is dead against it," Ware continued. "The government sees that these Sunni militias are being used as a counterbalance to their own Shia militias, which of course are backed by Iran." However, Ware sees that as an additional advantage to the strategy in the eyes of the US military. "These people are not fools," he said of the US commanders. "They know what's going on."

The following video contains clips from CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, broadcast on July 19 and CNN's American Morning, broadcast on July 20.