Tuesday, 28 September 2010
UN Fact-Finding Mission Says Israelis "Executed" US Citizen Furkan Dogan
The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.
The report says Dogan had apparently been "lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time" before being shot in his face.
The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is "tattooing around the wound in his face," indicating that the shot was "delivered at point blank range." The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that "the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back."
Based on both "forensic and firearm evidence," the fact-finding panel concluded that Dogan's killing and that of five Turkish citizens by the Israeli troops on the Mavi Marmari May 31 "can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions." (See Report [.pdf] Page 38, Section 170)
The report confirmed what the Obama administration already knew from the autopsy report on Dogan, but the administration has remained silent about the killing of Dogan, which could be an extremely difficult political problem for the administration in its relations with Israel.
The Turkish government gave the autopsy report on Dogan to the US Embassy in July and it was then passed on to the Department of Justice, according to a US government source who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the administration's policy of silence on the matter. The source said the purpose of obtaining the report was to determine whether an investigation of the killing by the Justice Department (DOJ) was appropriate...
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Gareth Porter @'truth-out'
Monday, 27 September 2010
Netanyahu urges talks as Israel settlement freeze ends
Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the Palestinians to continue peace talks despite an end to Israel's ban on West Bank settlement-building.
In a statement moments after the end of the 10-month partial freeze, he asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to continue seeking a "historic" deal.
Hours later, bulldozers were reported to have begun work in two settlements.
Mr Abbas had warned that peace talks would be a "waste of time" unless the freeze was extended.
Construction work
Israeli media said bulldozers had started levelling ground for 50 homes in the settlement of Ariel in the northern West Bank.
However, construction work was expected to be slow because of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
Similar activity was also reported in the settlement of Adam.
Meanwhile, the US renewed calls for Israel to maintain the construction freeze, saying its position on the issue remained unchanged and the US state department was staying "in close touch" with all parties.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to Mr Netanyahu and also to Tony Blair, the representative of the Middle East Quartet (the EU, Russia, the UN and US), as the end of the construction freeze neared, a spokesman said.
Israel says the settlements are no bar to continuing direct talks on key issues, and US negotiators have been working intensively to secure a deal.
On Saturday, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told the BBC he would attempt to convince government colleagues of a compromise deal, said the chances of a deal on the issue was "50/50".
Gun attack
The freeze on building in the West Bank expired at midnight local time on Sunday (2200 GMT).
Earlier in the evening, a pregnant Israeli woman and her husband were lightly wounded in a gun attack in the West Bank.
Israeli police said Palestinian gunmen opened fire on their car south of the city of Hebron. The woman later gave birth in hospital.
Meanwhile, some Jewish settlers started celebrating the end of the construction ban.
At the Jewish settlement of Revava, near the Palestinian town of Deir Itsia, reports said they released balloons and broke ground for a new nursery school before the moratorium expired.
The Israel prime minister called on the Palestinians to continue peace talks, which recently resumed after a 20-month pause and have the strong backing of US President Barack Obama.
"Israel is ready to pursue continuous contacts in the coming days to find a way to continue peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority," Mr Netanyahu said in his statement.
It was possible "to achieve a historic framework accord within a year", Mr Netanyahu said.
However, his statement did not directly mention the issue of the settlement freeze.
He had earlier urged settlers "to display restraint and responsibility".
'Waste of time'
On Sunday, Mr Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, warned that the peace talks renewed earlier this month would be futile unless the ban continued.
"If Israel does not continue the settlement freeze, the peace process will be a waste of time," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying during a visit to Paris.
However, Mr Abbas suggested that he would consult with other Arab leaders before any decision was taken. A meeting is expected in Cairo within the next 10 days.
The BBC's Wyre Davies in Jerusalem says the Palestinian leader is in a difficult position, with Israel offering few concessions, at least publicly.
If he continues negotiations, he will face accusations from his own side that the Palestinians will have backed down in the face of Israeli intransigence, our correspondent says.
It is estimated that about 2,000 housing units in the West Bank already have approval and settler leaders say they plan to resume construction as soon as possible.
The partial moratorium on new construction was agreed to by Israel in November 2009 under pressure from Washington.
It banned construction in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since the Middle East war of 1967, but never applied to settlements in East Jerusalem.
US President Barack Obama has urged Israel to extend the moratorium, saying it "made a difference on the ground, and improved the atmosphere for talks".
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
Leaving Your Mark
No, this isn’t some fancy Photoshop trick, these are real human footprints ingrained in a hardwood floor.
70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day...
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Twitter has allowed us to see directly into the brain of 50 Cent. And it's not pretty
Does the Anglo-Saxon poetry theory make Ja Rule Grendel? … 50 Cent. Photograph: Diane Bondareff/AP
When the exciting new thing called social media first came along, it promised to do what years of reality television, forests' worth of glossy magazines and countless fish-suppers' worth of paparazzi shots failed quite to manage: it would allow celebrities to show us The Real Them.
If you ever wondered what really went on in the heads of the people you are used to goggling at on telly, you needed wonder no longer: now, thanks to the wonder of Twitter, we would be able to SEE DIRECTLY INTO THEIR BRAINS.
It seems to work; at least for celebrities who write their own tweets. You discover that Simon Pegg is funny and nice, Graham Linehan intelligent and politically conscious, William Gibson geeky and sociable, Amy Winehouse a bit erratic, and 50 Cent . . . well, you discover that 50 Cent is an absolutely epic plonker.
He is rapidly becoming a reason in himself to go on Twitter. It's grammatically haphazard – as he says: "Any sucker can press spell check" – but you tend to get the gist. "A yal be on twitter meeting each other. Then yal be fucking this shit is crazy. I wanta find me a bad bitch on twitter. Lol" is pretty much average.
In the last week or so alone he has told us about having "shaved the poodle", encouraged female followers to tweet him pictures of themselves in their bras and pants, speculated ungallantly on the private parts of other artistes (Erykah Badu's, he says cryptically, "make a nigga colour blind"), and announced the formation of a three million-strong cult led by, er, him, with sketchy proposals for a eugenic breeding programme.
A very useful supplementary feed – @English50Cent – interprets his sayings for those less with it. For instance, when Fiddy found himself having an online scrap with some pre-teen Justin Bieber fans, he tweeted: "I'm a take my belt off and beat one of you little motherfuckers were your mama and daddy at anyway bad ass kids." @English50Cent translated: "I am going to remove my trousers and attack some children."
This is all glorious in a horrifying sort of way. But is this 50 Cent making his own myth or undermining it? From time to time you can tell – or imagine you can – that a member of Fiddy's entourage has risked life and limb to physically wrest the iPhone from the boss's grip and started tweeting on his behalf.
He spells better and becomes more philosophical. "To hate me is to hate success," he says. He adds that university degrees are a better test of short-term memory than underlying intelligence. And he warns: "I do believe that a wise man who plays the part of a fool will learn faster."
Some years ago, Giles Foden was banished to Pseud's Corner when he used these pages to compare Eminem to Robert Browning. But he was on to something, really. He argued, quite reasonably, that the songs should be understood as dramatic monologues: Slim Shady's antisocial tendencies are no more reflective of Marshall Mathers's true feelings than the wife-murdering narrator of My Last Duchess reflected those of Browning, in real life uxorious to a fault.
Pop music has always been about projecting a persona as much as about putting over a song, and this goes double for rap. My theory is that you need to look further back than the Victorians, though: gangsta rap is basically Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, only with phat beatz instead of fat Geats.
In gangster rap, as in Anglo-Saxon verse, you've got a poem or song – semi-improvisational, sound-patterned with rhyme or alliteration – designed to inflate an already preposterous reputation. The archetypal hero is a boastful fellow, distinguished by three things: being able to drink more mead (or smoke more weed) than everyone else, amass more gold (bling) than everyone else, and kill more enemies in fights than everyone else.
The Anglo-Saxon poet, arguably, was a little more respectful of women and less likely to insert the disclaimer "no homo" into an account of male companionship than his modern-day heirs, but the point basically holds.
What effect does social media have on the process? Deflationary, I think. The Beowulf poet wrote in the third person, but 50 Cent does so in the first. Beowulf had a scop (poet) to mediate his great deeds to posterity; Twitter goes out direct.
Does a Twitter feed ironise the image created by artist and record company, then? Is Fiddy the philosopher-king, Fiddy the Bieber-basher or Fiddy the poodle-shaver the real one? Far from allowing us to see directly into his brain, we may be no closer to knowing the real 50 Cent after all. But we feel we are, and that's somehow diminishing.
"Hwaet!" is what Beowulf would have tweeted to his adversary. "@grendelsmom I'm a beat you lol." Lol perhaps, but on balance the original has more oomph.
Sam Leith @'The Guardian'
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