The recent Israeli military incursions into the Rafah refugee camp have left 1,240 Palestinians homeless. According to UNRWA, this brings the total number of Palestinians who have been made homeless in Rafah since the beginning of the current Intifada to 7,523. The total for the whole of the Gaza Strip now stands at 11,987. These home demolitions are grievous, immoral, and illegal acts perpetrated by the occupation forces against a defenseless civilian population of mostly women and children. The demolitions are acts of collective punishment and grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, humanitarian international law, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to Amnesty International, such wanton destruction "constitutes a war crime." These horrendous acts are accompanied by similar acts of ethnic cleansing and expulsions in the West Bank.

ACTION REQUESTED

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition once again calls on all people of conscience to help the victims of the Rafah refugee camp demolitions by donating directly to UNRWA. Donations will be distributed to the victims who need help getting through the cold winter months.

Funny how little has changed in 40 years:

"In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.  Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around.  You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there.  We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.  We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work.  But this isn't the test.  The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here the process is more subtle, but the end results are the same.  I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in.  The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the

It was in June that President Bush first began talking about “revisionist history”, a gambit that took some of us a little by surprise since he showed no previous signs of having read any history, revisionist or otherwise.   

  This was a little after he delayed the homecoming of several hundred American sailors by using their aircraft carrier to proclaim that the war was over.  But if the war was over, and the point was to be rid of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, why were no weapons of mass destruction found, not even at the sites the U.S. said it had identified? It was those who were impertinent enough to raise this question that the president accused of revisionist history.  

            There’s been a lot of revisionist history around lately, from the president, and from the Democrats who are trying to distance themselves from a war that they couldn’t support strongly enough less than a year ago.     

 

Dear Sirs: