He shrugged and replied, "It's our job."
I know how that is and upon taking my seat, I opened back up to Jeff Halper's 2009 edition of Obstacles to Peace. On page 86, Jeff wrote:
"When the Oslo process began, about 200,000, Israelis lived beyond the Green Line; by the end the number had doubled to 400,000...Tensions came to a- head with Sharon's provocative foray to the Haram/Temple Mount triggered the outbreak of the second Intifada.
"For the Palestinian 'street' the uprising, which was initially either non-violent or limited to the throwing of stones at soldiers erupted out of fear that Israel and the US would succeed in pressuring Arafat to sign the Camp David "agreement". Rather than being directed by Arafat, an accusation discredited even by the Israeli Security Services the uprising was directed against him as much as it was against the ever more repressive Occupation.
"The Israeli army began its onslaught on the Palestinian areas in October 2001, aided by post-9/11 American complicity and carefully framed in Bush's own words: to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism."
"Sharon persuaded the Bush Administration that he could bring the Palestinian Authority to its knees within a matter of months, thereby achieving "industrial quiet" on the Israel/Palestine front that would enable the US to proceed with its plans against Iraq...Israel played a key role in training American troops for the invasion by building mock Iraqi neighborhoods and villages in the Negev.
-
"Israeli's
security services also contributed to the disinformation campaign over Saddam
Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction that preceded the invasion. And
the US adopted from Israel its model of occupation,
complete with a Civil Administration and a policy of demolishing Iraqi homes
for 'security reasons'."[ISBN: 978-965-90262-1-4]
Ann Jones, humanitarian aid worker and author of Kabul in Winter recently wrote from Kabul, Afghanistan:
"I've come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos- giant, grey sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They're stacked against the walls of government buildings, U.N. agencies, embassies, NGO offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) -- and they only seem to grow and multiply...What's called security generates fear.
"How Lies Begat Illusions Begat Lies...you can't understand the Taliban without knowing about America's covert operations in the region in the 1980s. Back then, President Ronald Reagan's administration, mainly through the CIA, used the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan subsequently used "channels built with U.S. money" to install in Afghanistan a friendly government -- the Taliban.
"Later, after the George W. Bush administration invaded the country and the U.S. ousted the Taliban, it installed Hamid Karzai as president and returned many of the old Islamist jihadis to power in his government. Thus, this peculiar, well-established fact underlies the current war in Afghanistan: the United States sponsored both sides.
"Only the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called, year after year, for a moral accounting. Its surveys of Afghan citizens consistently find that the people want lasting peace, and to attain it, they would prefer some sort of truth and reconciliation procedure, like the one that took place in South Africa, to cleanse the country and set it on an honest intellectual and moral footing.
-
"As I write, 4,000 newly arrived U.S. Marines are trudging through the blistering heat of Helmand Province to
push back the Taliban so local Pashtuns can turn out to vote next month for
Karzai, their fellow Pashtun. What's wrong with this new Obama strategy? For
one thing, in some areas the local Pashtun population has instead turned out to
fight against the foreign invaders, side by side with the Taliban (who, it
should be remembered, are mostly local Pashtuns). They're as fed up as anybody
with the puppet Karzai. Like millions of other Afghans, they say Karzai has
done nothing for the people. But saddled with history, Karzai remains the horse
the U.S. rode in on." http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175096
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