Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Marian Houk
These are Haidar Abdel-Shafi words at the opening of the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the Middle East there is no superfluous people outside time and place, but rather a state sorely missed by time and place – the state of Palestine. Our homeland has never ceased to exist in [...]
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Filed under: Gaza, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians
Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Marian Houk
Back in 1999, Azmi Bishara, the brilliant but over-wordy Israeli Arab member of Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) wrote that a Palestinian state is becoming an Israeli demand. Bishara is now in somewhat-self-imposed exile, somewhere in the Arab world, to avoid probable indictment for having given some critical information to Hezbollah in a phone call last summer, [...]
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Filed under: Donors, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians, Quartet
Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Marian Houk
No television network carried the entire session at Columbia University – they cut-out and put on their un-prepared announcers, and brought in analysts, every time it seemed to get “boring”. So, it might be useful to take a look at the entire transcript, prepared by the Congressional Quarterly transcription service, and published today by the [...]
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Filed under: Iran
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Marian Houk
Just like everything else here, there is no clear or reliable information, no instructions on how to procede, no knowledge on which to make any life plans. And construction of The Wall is proceeding apace furiously just down the street. The owner of the corner shop says there are only ten meters left to close [...]
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Filed under: Human Rights, International Law, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians, Register of damages due to The Wall
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Marian Houk
…as Iran’s President Ahmadinejad insisted, apparently sincerely, in his appearance before Columbia University students in New York yesterday, during his visit to attend the annual UN General Assembly’s high-level session. Those homosexuals who have been executed were actually punished for establishing fiendishly clever and successful drug-running networks, if Ahmadinejad’s remarks were not a non sequitur. [...]
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Filed under: Iran
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Marian Houk
…while 48% say no, according to Time Magazine’s poll results from interviews with 4482 people — about one-third more than the number of people who died in the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. New York State was one of the “yes” (or blue) states, as was the entire West Coast as well. In [...]
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Filed under: Iran
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Marian Houk
Time Magazine has an appropriately sceptical and sarcastic account of yesterdays “high-level” meeting at the UN on how to stop or stall climate change: “Though political awareness of the need to grapple with climate change was clearly at an all-time high — scores of national leaders don’t suddenly convene at the U.N. without a decent [...]
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Filed under: Environment
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Marian Houk
Again, UNSG BAN Ki-Moon was the one to read out the statement issued by the Quartet (U.S., Russian Federation, European Union, and the UNSG). Again, probably nobody else wanted to do it. At this meeting of the Quartet, at UNHQ/NY, the Quartet’s new representative, Tony Blair, joined the meeting, along with U.S. Secretary of State [...]
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Filed under: BAN Ki-Moon, Gaza, Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians, Quartet
Posted on September 23rd, 2007 by Marian Houk
Some blame for the tragedy, after the deadly August 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, was attributed to the refusal of the UN staff there to accept more U.S. military protection. Now, the U.S. is pushing for the UN to increase its international staff presence in Iraq — and the offer of U.S. [...]
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Filed under: Iraq, US in UN
Posted on September 23rd, 2007 by Marian Houk
Just in time for a series of big meetings at the UNHQ in New York, the Israeli cabinet voted on Sunday to free some 90 out of about 11,000 Palestinians currently being held or detained by Israel. The lucky few Palestinians to be freed are all Fatah-related. The Associated Press is reporting that the Palestinian [...]
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Filed under: Israel, Middle East Peace Process, Palestine & Palestinians, Quartet
