He obviously hasn’t heard about the crimes taking place in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

From the Associated Press:

Prosecutor charges Sudan president with genocide

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has filed genocide charges against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

The charges filed Monday include masterminding attempts to wipe out African tribes in Darfur with a campaign of murder, rape and deportation.

Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is asking a three-judge panel to issue an arrest warrant for Al-Bashir to prevent the deaths of those still under attack in Darfur from government-backed janjaweed militia. He says the genocide is continuing and must be stopped.

I’m a bit surprised and sad this post is even necessary, but a visitor pushed Holocaust denial in a thread, and though we addressed it there, it seemed wise to address it in its own post as well. What exactly does one say to a Holocaust denier, assuming he or she is even remotely sincere and not merely a provocateur? I was thinking it might be akin to talking to someone who holds a geocentric view of our solar system, but even that falls woefully short, because it doesn’t encompass the bigotry, the rejection of overwhelming documentary evidence, and the potential real world impact. Holocaust denial may be the ultimate combination of intellectual dishonesty, willful ignorance and irrational rage.

As Columbia University President Lee Bollinger put it to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (emphasis added):

In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “legend.” One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

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Oh, man… we’re two-faced! Whodathunkit?

Actually, Dr. Eland is right on the mark. We lost our way a long time ago. Past administrations were much better at rationalizing their apparent ‘improprieties’. Today, they simply don’t seem to give a damn.

U.S. double standards for friend/foe

“If the U.S. is going to criticize other countries- behavior, it should eliminate the double standards at home first.”

Since World War II, the U.S. has been the most aggressive country in the world.

The Bush administration is attempting to soothe the Turkish government’s apoplectic reaction to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s label of “genocide” on Turkey’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians, which occurred almost a century ago.
[...]

Similarly, the United States has never been too enthusiastic about criticizing Japan’s denial of having used Chinese and South Korean women as sex slaves (so-called “comfort women”) during World War II.
[...]

Yet the administration is still repeatedly bringing up Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s December, 2005 denial of the historical fact of the Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazis.

That’s because the U.S. government chooses to get along a lot less with the Iranian government (than it does with the governments of Turkey and Japan); because Israel, Iran’s nemesis, is a U.S. ally; and because the administration can win points with its domestic Israeli lobby.

In the same vein, the administration is supposed to be supporting the expansion of democracy overseas-that’s why the United States invaded Iraq, right?-but does so only in less friendly countries, not close allies.

Dr. Eland

Aljazeera.com

from Earthtimes.org

Heiligendamm, Germany - Popstars Bob Geldof and Bono dismissed the decisions taken by the leaders of the industrialized world on aid to Africa in strong language as the G8 summit closed in the northern German resort of Heiligendamm. “What happened over the last two days was bollocks,” Geldof told a press conference called immediately after summit host German Chancellor Angela Merkel had delivered her summing up to the media.

He accused Merkel of “accepting the argument but rejecting the logical conclusions of the argument” on the need for a much greater effort to help the world’s poor.

Geldof, who is now better known for his activism on behalf of Africa than for his music, said the G8 leaders had missed an opportunity to take measures that “could help the poor of the world at a cheap price.”

Calling the G8 leaders “creeps,” he called on them to “get serious.”

“This wasn’t serious. This was a total farce,” Geldof said.

Bono said he had little to add, but picking up the G8 communique on Africa, he called it “obfuscation” and “Eurobabble.”

The 60 billion dollars pledged in additional funding to combat infectious disease misrepresented the additional money that would in fact be spent, he said.

Bono accused the G8 communique of creating a language maze, “a maze of language trying to lose us, but we are not lost, the G8 are lost,” he said.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Holocaust Remembrance Day has been observed by different countries on different days over the years. In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly voted to follow the German and later British examples and set January 27th as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and probably most well-known of the Nazi concentration camps. Meanwhile, April 16th this year marks Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day as observed in Israel and many Jewish communities (some history of the Yom HaShoah date and observance debate is here). I consider the specific date of observance much less important than the observance itself. While remembering the Holocaust can be an affirmation of cultural identity and solidarity for some, it can also be a simple recognition of shared humanity.
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Jerusalem

The Palestinians of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip began to count the cost of a month-long Israeli invasion as the troops finally pulled out yesterday, leaving a trail of anger, despair and devastation behind them.

More than 42,000 olive, citrus and date trees had been uprooted, according to the local council. Altogether, 4,405 acres of orchards, vineyards and vegetable fields were flattened.

Officials accused the army of demolishing 21 houses and damaging a further 314. Five factories and 19 wells were also destroyed. They said the loss could reach as high as £70m.

The Israelis said they went in to stop Hamas militants firing rockets at Sderot, a town of 24,000 across the border inside Israel. One salvo killed a three-year-old boy and a middle-aged man there five weeks ago. A house was damaged earlier this week, and two more rockets fell on open ground yesterday.

Before pulling out, the army distributed leaflets with a cartoon showing rockets bouncing back at Beit Hanoun. “Terror,” it read, “will kill you.”

Two weeks ago Hamas gunmen shot dead a youth whose family tried to stop them firing rockets from their backyard for fear of reprisals, but the blockade may yet rebound on Israel.

Basel al Masri, a farmer who lost an acre and a half of grape vines, said: “Everybody here agrees that the militants should not fire from a densely populated area. But after this massive destruction, the people of Beit Hanoun will tell them to come and fire rockets from the tops of our houses.”

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BEIT HANOUN, Gaza (Reuters)

Rasmiya Mahmoud has seen plenty of Israeli raids into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. But nothing like this.

Dozens of Israeli tanks have encircled the town of 30,000 people since Wednesday. Heavily armed soldiers, trying to stop militant rocket fire at the nearby Jewish state, have fought running battles with militants.

The army has curbed movement, telling people to stay home, and rounded many men up for questioning. It is hard for reporters to move from the outskirts of town to the center.

On Saturday, however, the army allowed women in Beit Hanoun to go out for two hours to buy food.

“Myself and other women were shocked. It’s unbelievable,” Mahmoud, a teacher, said by telephone after venturing outside.

“Electricity poles have been uprooted, the road has been torn up. Sewage has flooded into the streets,” she added.

More than 30 Palestinians, half of them civilians, have been killed in Beit Hanoun in the past four days, medical officials said. One Israeli soldier has also been killed.

Israel’s army has denied suggestions it had seized the town, saying it was under a “general closure”.

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“This is a mayday call to all colleagues around the world to STOP writing about the Iraqi issue without having enough information from reliable sources. People are getting killed here and the country is virtually dying and it is not so human to rob the dead! IBC supposedly worked to correct the number of Iraqis killed because of the US occupation of Iraq. All I saw in this violent attack upon the Lancet was a harsh offensive that adds the killing of truth to whatever number of killings that actually took place by gunfire and bombs.”

It is the single most important statistic regarding the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq. How many Iraqis have been killed?

655,000.

655,000 Iraqis killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I have worked for eight months in Iraq as a journalist, witnessing the carnage on a daily basis, visiting the morgues with bodies and body parts piled into them, meeting family after family who had lost a loved one, or more … Finally, we get an accurate figure that shows how immense the scale of the long drawn carnage really is.

The first Lancet Report, published on October 29, 2004, reported that there were 100,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths as the result of the US invasion and occupation. (Excess deaths are the difference between pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality rates.) Whenever I have given public presentations about the occupation, I have invariably found myself in a difficult position due to the lack of a more realistic and recent figure I can cite, knowing full well that the number was grossly higher than 100,000.

Read more at Antiwar.com

Israel Ramps Up Gaza Offensive; 4 Dead

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel stepped up its offensive in the Gaza Strip on Friday, killing at least four people in a series of attacks throughout the coastal area.

The fighting brought the death toll in the offensive to 13 Palestinians, including a young girl, since Thursday.

The army has been carrying out an offensive throughout Gaza since June, when militants linked to the ruling Hamas militant group tunneled into Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. The soldier remains in captivity.

After a recent lull, the fighting has picked up in recent days. Israel TV said the operation in Gaza Friday was the largest there in weeks.

An Israeli aircraft attacked a car in the northern Gaza Strip, killing three Hamas militants, including a local commander, the group said. Witnesses said the force of the blast ripped the white sedan into two parts. The army confirmed it had carried out the strike.

In the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian hospital officials said Israeli troops shot a 29-year-old woman outside her house in the village of Abassan.

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Nine die in air strikes on Gaza

A day of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip has left nine people dead, including at least four Hamas militants and two children, reports say.
A missile hit a Hamas official’s house after nightfall, but the target survived and two adults and a girl aged 10 died, Palestinian sources said.

Earlier, a boy aged 14, four militants and another person died in an Israeli air attack in southern Gaza.

Israel confirmed both attacks, saying it had been targeting militants.

There have been frequent raids on the Gaza Strip since an Israeli soldier was kidnapped in June by Palestinian gunmen.

More than 200 Palestinians have been killed.

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Unexploded Israeli bombs and devices dropped during Israel’s war on Hezbollah have killed 21 and injured more than 100 Lebanese civilians.

The unexploded bombs, mostly sub munitions, landed indiscriminately in civilian areas, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Sunday.

The OCHA said it had recorded 608 areas where cluster munitions landed, “with more locations being identified every day”.

UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland in August said it was “completely immoral … that 90 per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict when it was clear a UN resolution was about to bring about a ceasefire”.

Lebanese police said that 21 people had been killed by the bomblets, including 16 civilians and five army bomb-disposal experts, since the 34-day conflict ended on August 14.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the Israeli army fired at least 1.2 million rockets into Lebanon during the conflict.

The cluster bombs used by Israel contain hundreds of bomblets which are dispersed over a large area. Those that do not explode on impact turn into lethal anti-personnel mines.

Cluster munitions are controversial, as human-rights groups say they cause indiscriminate civilian casualties over large areas.

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